Among the many useless but consoling facts I’ve hung on to at the expense of real knowledge is the telephone number of my best friend from high school. I can say it in my head – 612505 – and, like a combination lock, it throws open the door to a memory of me sitting on the stairs after school, yakking to the person I’d just said goodbye to on the bus. Given it’s more than 30 years since I used that number, I have to assume it will stay with me – along with the lyrics to the Cadbury’s Roses ad from 1983, the name of the fictional head teacher of Summer Bay High (Mr Fisher) and my own telephone number from that era (623492) – until the day I die.
I hadn’t given much thought to landlines or the teenage experience of sitting on them after school every day, until a recent piece in the Atlantic shared the results of a small, highly localised experiment: in Portland, Maine, a parent nervous of giving her 10-year-old child a smartphone took the eccentric step of reintroducing a landline, and then persuaded the parents of her child’s friends to do the same. Before she knew it, between 15 and 20 families in the area had reinstalled landlines for their preteens in what the Atlantic called a “retro bubble”. Charming scenes ensued, communications habits changed, and everyone learned a valuable lesson about the advantages of ancient technology.
