Boxes of Delight

Red telephone boxes are as much a part of the national landscape, mental and physical, as power pylons or steeples, or at least they used to be.  They used to be a ubiquitous and pleasing feature of cities, towns, villages, hamlets, crossroads and random stretches of ‘road’ in places so rural you’d wonder that Christianity had reached that far, never mind telephony.

Originating in an age when it was far from the norm to have a telephone in the home unless your surname was ‘Bell’, or you were a character in a costume drama, the original function of these architectural and technological delights was to allow people to telephone other people.  But barely had the bright red paint dried before the role of these local landmarks evolved.

The first step in the evolution of the telephone box was its emergence as a dramatic character.  A person goes into a telephone box and rings another person.  So far, so normal.  But an empty telephone box with a ringing ‘phone?  That’s the start of the sort of plot only rivalled by somebody stepping off on to a deserted railway platform to be informed by a ‘suitably’ ‘characterful’ ‘station master’ that no train has stopped here for twenty years.

As more and more homes got more and more ‘phones, the telephone box moved from being the place you went to to make a telephone call to being the place that you went to to make a private telephone call (you could tell an adulterer in times past because they always had lots of loose change), ironic considering that they were constructed out of steel…and glass, and illuminated. 

As technology advanced, telephone boxes took on roles unconnected with calls, booty or otherwise.  The normal place for displaying business cards is, of course, the newsagents’ window, but thanks to the advancement in printing technology and in particular to business card printing machines being made available in service stations and other haunts of lorry drivers and travelling salesmen, and hence by extension to their service sector, prozzers were able to create professional looking business cards cheaply and in volume, and distribute them around telephone boxes.  Telephone boxes took on something of a festive atmosphere, if your idea of festive is a business-card blizzard of smutty invitations, as the interiors of telephone boxes began to look a little like top shelves, festooned with graphic graphics.  Accordingly, a trip to a red call box could resemble a visit to a red light district.

These temples of communication also provided other sorts of relief in times of extremis.  Many a chap, decent chaps, honest chaps, the sort of chap who would shudder to relieve themselves against a tree, well, an oak, well, a listed oak, would of an evening be profoundly glad to happen across a telephone box to answer not a ringing handset but the call of nature.

There was, of course, a protocol to be observed in such cases.  Firstly, one always avoided any tramp that might have taken up residence overnight in a traditional telephone box.  (BT (Bastard Telecom) modified the design of telephone boxes in the 80s, changing them into telephone ‘kiosks’ in a move which perfectly encapsulated a shift from a public service GPO monument to humanity that would serve not only as a tool of communication but shelter from the storm, to a profit-driven monster, putting into service a plexiglazz monstrosity that had a gap all the way around the bottom, presumably to allow the elements to penetrate and so discourage overnight guests.  Or possibly to provide adequate drainage.)  The protocols, famously illustrated by a small sign illustrated by none other than Quinten Blake that used to delight, inform and repulse in equal measure, were that if one was relieving oneself in a telephone box, one always faced away from any observer(s), and always held the handset firmly and confidently gripped in the unemployed hand.  Just a chap, making a call, and if you happen to notice that a chap has his chap (or indeed his penis) in his other hand, then any shocked observer could take comfort in the certainty that urinating is just about the least offensive thing that the occupant of the telephone box can be doing in such a pose.

The telephone box has so often doubled up as a crisis WC that rumour has it that in the days when telephone boxes had telephone directories in them (a forerunner of today’s telephone box libraries, though exclusively stocked with books with lots of characters and not much plot), serious thought was given to printing the directories on soft paper, possible perforated.

The rise in the increase of mobile ‘phone ownership coincided with a decline in courtesy to others and of inhibitions about sharing private details with total strangers.  People making a telephone call no longer sought a soundproof booth but instead favoured busy public transport or hitherto quiet and peaceful spots to make their telephone calls.

So it was that the telephone box fell into disuse.

As a telephone box.

They ceased making money because even though nobody was using them, they still had to be cleaned and occasionally de-tramped.  Slowly telephone boxes started to disappear, airbrushed out of the landscape.  (Sadly, not everyone thought to check to see if mobile ‘phone coverage extended to all the sites now marked not with a proud, glittering. Illuminated, slightly pee-smelling red box, but with a square of concrete.)

Of course, if there were any justice in the world, a succession of small plaques would be sunk into the otherwise anonymous concrete squares that, like the footsteps of telephony prehysteria, now dot the land.  A small plaque to commemorate a huge event, for instance that such-and-such a person ‘phoned their mother and father to inform them they had become grandparents from this site in 1965; that Debbi Broke Up With Darren using this ‘phone box in 1984, that in the same year, Darren confirmed to Debbi’s best friend Mandy that Debbi was a right slag anyway, and did Mandy want to go to out with him? And that in 1993, a profoundly relieved Jeff profoundly relieved himself on this very site.

The ‘problem’ with traditional red telephone boxes is that they have more individual panes of glass in them than the average cathedral, and so are devilish hard to clean, even if not be-tramped.  Naturally, as soon as Bloody Terrible stopped cleansing telephone receivers and started cleansing the landscape of character, the nation revolted.  Anyone who produced rural postcards of a sheep standing by a dry stone wall next to a red telephone box realised that sheep and stone alone just don’t do it.  The middle class mobilised.  In 4x4s.

As a result, many villages have successfully held on to their red telephone boxes (usually the same places that have held on to village greens).  Of course, they may not have managed to hold on to their indigenous population or village youth that has been priced out of the place by second home buyers, but at least the centre of the village still has its crimson totem to modernity.

Now though, more than ever, we know that telephone boxes can fulfil duel functions.

Telephone boxes have, famously, become village libraries, a phenomenon that started in 1994 when a lady in Masham left three copies of Catherine Cookson on a shelf by mistake, started a national trend, and has been too embarrassed to ask for them back since.

And there are yet more modern social uses.  Because it’s not just the internet that’s slow in rural areas. Ambulance response times being what they are in the countryside, there’s been a couple of reactions.  The first is a very practical approach to dealing with any accident involving threshing machinery.  Following the screams and panicked shut down, people pack anything still twitching in frozen peas and then hey ho for the nearest hospital.  Everyone then gathers at the local pub to wait for an update on successful re-attachment.  The first time anyone mentions ‘micro-surgery’ it is the law that somebody must say ‘was it his cock that got cut off’?  Followed by ‘I don’t make the rules’.

The second reaction is the most modern incarnation.  Village defibrillator.

On the face of it, this is a great idea.  With more and more people having more and more unrealistic expectations of their ability to do stuff, like running marathons, staying upright on a bar stool or enduring another fucking day on public transport, it’s a wonder that everyone doesn’t carry around their own defibrillator, like an evacuee carrying around a box on a piece of string that he or she imagines contains a gas mask bust in fact only contains an apologetic note from their mum explaining that their mask has in fact been sold for gin.

Defibrillators are appearing in more and more places.  Like pubs.  And surely that can’t be healthy.  Naturally, if a beloved boozer keels over and pegs it half way down a pint of what the landlord laughingly refers to as his best, then this will lead not just to blokes reading about the demise thinking ‘that’s the way to go’, or indeed the regulars all doing the sort of mental calculation that would boggle Turing to determine when would be the decent time to take up residence on Fatty’s recently vacated bar stool.  It leads to a few charity nights and the proud purchase of a defibrillator for the pub.  Of course, it’s only a short jolt to think that once the locals work out that the thing is rechargeable, they can incorporate it into their evening with, in descending order of idiocy, options including: 1) answering pub quiz questions after having paddles applied to both temples and being ‘zapped’, 2) playing ‘how high can you go’ on the voltage charge, noting that some wag has written ‘Frankenstein’ on one of the settings; 3) playing ‘Jason Statham’ by trying to improvise an anti-bad guy weapon and propel other people across the room by paddling their nipples with electricity; 4) playing doctor by bellowing ‘clear’ and then zapping an unsuspecting drinker in the arse and, of course, the winner, 5) the ‘electric boogie’: suck a lime, tequila shot, lick salt off of a live paddle.

But the latest incarnation of the telephone box as a home for the village defibrillator is something else.  Especially when you consider that only people trained in the use of the defibrillator may use it.  That’s probably a good thing, the last thing you need to see is some idiot spitting on some paddles for improved connectivity and electrocuting himself.

However.  Village life is interesting.  It is easy to start an argument (I refuse to use the term feud, we’re not, as Ross Kemp remarked in ‘Ultimate Force’, Americans) in an English village.  Defibrillators are expensive kit, so presumably only accessed by trained community members, these are the people you do not want to piss off, especially if you are lardy.  So.  It’s important to keep those keymasters trained to use the defibrillator and trusted with a key to its cabinet, on side.  The last thing you need to do if you like your beer, fags and lining your arteries with cheese is to forget to return those pinking shears you borrowed off the stuck up bloke who lives in ‘the Old Rectory’ and which you secretly used to trim your toenails.

It’s right that what was once an electronically powered beating heart of the village should once again be an electronically powered beating heart restarter of the village.

As to what’s next for the village telephone box?  It’s either going to be the recharging point, take off and landing pad for the village delivery drone, or home to the village three dee printer that will print your grocery order for you using protein goo and dye.

And, of course, it’s the perfect shape to operate as the village teleport kiosk once that technology is perfected, it’s even got the dial mechanism to enter the co-ordinates.