The landline may be having a renaissance – but it’s to a world in which the art of phone calls has changed

‘I remember decades ago when our son was startled by the dusty old rotary dial phone in my parents’ garage as if it were some instrument of torture or intergalactic messaging device.’ Photograph: Rawpixel/Getty Images

When something becomes old and then new again during my lifetime, I might be forgiven for feeling at once quite aged and a little sentimental.

But suggestions that the landline telephone may be having a cultural renaissance just make me feel old and somewhat triggered by experiences of fraught teenage social negotiations over the long obsolete rotary dial phone of my youth.