2005-01-27 - 12:05 p.m.

I know I�m getting on, but is it really possible that I remember our family getting our very first phone? I only ask as yesterday I was coerced into trading up to a new mobile with camera, radio and attachment for home laser eye surgery, and it seems a long way from the innocent days of a big plastic cube sat in the hallway that only made calls if you were prepared to wrestle with the rotary mechanism for half an hour. Too many nines in the number and you wouldn�t bother at all.

I�m not trying to say our family was that poor or anything (�Our family was so poor we had to use the iron out of the Monopoly set to press our clothes��), I think that�s just the way things were for everyone in the seventies.

I remember me and my brother were only allowed to answer the phone if our parents weren�t in the room, and even then we had to use this formal greeting which bafflingly just involved saying the number back to whoever was calling. This was further refined at some point to giving the town and the number (�Hello, Chigley 74986.�) just in case anyone had got through to the wrong metropolis and had mistakenly got us instead of London or France.

The fact that the only that ever called our house were my Mum�s sister, my grandparents or, for a limited season only, an actual real life heavy breather, made the formality all the more senseless. But no, as far as my parents were concerned, that technology was there to be revered, goddammit.

I was generously allowed one phone call a week at first, though at eight years old, you can imagine that my little black book wasn�t exactly brimming with potential conversational participants. I remember mostly calling my best friend Chris to check what maths homework we had been given, even though I already knew, but it felt grown up to go through the motions.

Actually, one call a week, if you�ll allow me to be a hermitic sociopath for a second, sounds quite relaxing. Maybe I�ll just stop picking up. That�s something my parents would never do � not answer the phone. It commands their every waking move. Doesn�t matter if they�re preparing dinner, having the sex or in the middle of administering a delicate tracheotomy with the plastic tube of a biro, if that phone goes, they�re dropping everything and rushing to pick it up. You have to see the urgency at work here. It�s like they�re on the other end of that red phone that the president has to authorise nuclear strikes.

Needless to say, it�s always my mum�s sister saying she�ll be five minutes late for church or something equally vital.

So. Anyway. Phones. Yeah.

I�ve been feeling like seven kinds of crap for two days now. I seriously don�t think I�ve been ill since about 1996, so it�s something of a shock to be laid up in the couch watching arse-wit TV, though seeing as this was week one of unemployment, that was kind of the plan to begin with. I just hadn�t factored in hacking up my pancreas every four minutes. That said, at least I can sleep guilt-free. Hold all my calls.