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.

Chess

Chess.

More than just a fabulous musical, and arguably more than just a game.  Well, actually, plainly more than just a game, as mentioned in the previous sentence, it’s also a fabulous musical.  It takes a few minutes to learn the basics of the game, then a few more to learn how the knight moves, then some more to learn about castling and en-passant.  Basically it takes about forty, forty-five minutes to learn the basics of the game, but a lifetime to master.  That’s why chess is so popular in prison.

Chess is a game of strategy.  It’s actually the game of strategy and don’t ever let any tosser with a games console and a strategy-‘em-up tell you differently.  His (it’s always a ‘his’) new game set in a distant magical kingdom does not, despite the guff on the packaging and several hysterical broadsheet reviews filed by sleep deprived nerds, ‘have the complexity of chess’, although I can quite believe it has ‘the epic scope of the finest of fantasy novels’ and ‘female NPCs with really huge boobs’).

Chess requires you to think many moves ahead.  There are a finite number of openings, and established strategies, and end games tend to be relatively simple too, iso t’s in the middle where the drama is.

Chess, unusually for a board game, frequently ends in a draw or, when played between siblings, a fist fight.  As well as mastering the strategy and tactics, you also have to compete with the smug tosser on the other side of the board, smirking every time you make a move, which is exactly the sort of behaviour that will bet you into trouble on ‘C Wing’, by the way.

The other fabulous thing about chess is the variety of chess sets.  Even the simple ones are things of beauty.  I have an old (not antique, not valuable, just ‘old’, c1970s) travel chess set.  The board has little holes in it and the chess pieces slotted into it like pegs.  In the 1980s these sorts of chess sets were replaced with magnetic sets with the different pieces printed on little magnetic tiles.  Now, it’s probably an app.  Pah.

Once you start playing, you start to accumulate chess sets.  Although, oddly, new kit does not improve performance.  You need to get a robust one if children are learning, as the pieces have to be tough enough for handling by kids, but not heavy enough to do any lasting damage when they are used as weapons to augment the aforementioned fist fights that result from use of the word ‘checkmate’ in an enclosed environment.  You also get a really, really nice one that you plan to get out when playing with friends, but actually won’t let anyone else touch.

You even start to tinker with making your own.  This usually happens around seven in the evening on Christmas Day, when you have accumulated enough champagne/cava/prosecco corks to serve as Kings, Queens, Bishops, Rooks and so on, and enough bottletops of various colours to make pawns.  Board?  Back of a Cadbury’s selection box and a sharpie and you are good to go.  Warning, if this set is not assembled, painted and varnished by 27 December, it will be ‘tidied away’.

Oddly, the most charming chess sets tend not to be the ornamental, onyx, marble, ebony and Swarovski affairs that decorate the living rooms of the apartments of oligarchs’ tarts (although given the fate of some oligarchs, a nice chess set would be handy in their cell), but the ones with history.  This includes, let’s be clear, the Lewis chess men, but more often are the modest but beautiful sets one finds in what used to be known as ‘junk’ shops but, thanks to the proliferation of programmes featuring bargain hunting antique experts on daytime telly, we must now refer to as ‘curio emporiums’ or something.

These are objects that are loved.  Battlefields rightly become places of pilgrimage, a square of turf where sacrifices were made, deeds noble and ignoble done, where history was made, heroes crowned, villains vanquished.  The same goes for that small square chequered battlefield.

Also, you can get Star Wars chess sets!  How cool is that?

Postcard from Winchester - the Itchen

Winchester's river is The Itchen (it's too much to hope for that wherever Winchester is twinned with has a waterway called The Scratchen). Apparently in Roman times, the river was a bit of a bother, with being wet an all. The Romans got in their engineers and moved the river a few hundred yards to the left. The result is that today, the Itchen is possibly the most well behaved and mannered river I have ever seen, perfectly in keeping with the atmosphere of the town itself.

The river is about fifteen foot wide and a foot deep, and runs along what is now, thanks to building on both sides of the town, the backs of houses and a rather attractive footpath. It has all the advantages of a river; calming influence of water, ideal location for a riverside pub, ducks and so on, without the disadvantages that they can sometimes bring - raging angry torrents of water, graveyard for shopping trollies, bloated corpse lucky dip, that kind of thing. Apparently the river used to be twice as wide - oooohhhhhh, terrifying.

'Sire, hostile forces are massing on the other side of the river!'
'Worry not, they will never get across its expanse.'
'But sire...they have wellington boots!'
'Arse!'.

And so on.

The town still has a working water mill. Naturally this is now run by the National Trust and so one could buy bags of flour milled at the mill (I trust them, and did not look too closely at the empty bags from catering packs of Tesco value strong white flour in the bins round the back) as well as all the other necessities that populate a National Trust gift shop, such as jams, plush otters and a lady volunteer behind the till flustered by more than one customer at a time.


Because the temperature was so cold it hurt to take a deep breath, there was an interesting effect in the churning waters at the foot of the mill race, the spray had frozen to the lowest parts of the vegetation growing on the riverbank, giving the waterside a festive, decorative appearance, for all the world like those LED icicles that people hang from their guttering at Christmas, except not so chavvy.


The river wanders round the backs of houses and gardens, the gardens backing onto the river. One, rather magnificently, backs onto an area where the river diverts around...well it probably qualifies as an island, just, as 'stump in the water' sounds mean and it did have a population of three ducks. It also had space for somebody to nail up a (small) sign that read 'private'. What might seem like a mean and petty gesture was, in this instance, transformed into a magnificent one - imagine being able to say in all honesty that you had your own private island. Surely that is a privilege reserved for people like Richard Branson or Bond villains. Maybe Winchester is where Bond villains retire to, and the owner of the private island is constructing a death ray in his shed, an occupation he describes as 'pottering'.

The science of chance

I am walking, in my normal jaunty fashion, from the train station to home, looking forward to uncorking dinner, listening to 'a history of the world in 100 objects' on my iPod. The episode I am listening to is about a golden statue of a goddess, from Sri Lanka.

It's pretty racy stuff. The goddess is described as a two thirds life size female figure, with an hourglass figure, wearing a sarong on her lower half and topless with 'perfect' breasts. Rather than an object of titillation, she's an object of veneration, the narrator explains.

And just as he's describing her, I mean to the very second, I walk past the window of just about the only clothes shop in the village and the mannequin in the window is wearing a skirt but has her top half exposed.

Why? I'm not sure. I assume that the window dresser is back of shop, looking out a new top (it's way after closing time and, as odd as this may sound, seeing a topless mannequin makes me somewhat embarrassed for the plastic woman I the window.
Has she been forgotten, has the window dresser left in a rush or, god help us, is the shop trying to be controversial or trying to really hit that giggling schoolboy demographic? The mannequin stands in a typical cocktail party pose, glass in one hand, the other hand on hip, wearing a long skirt. Her head is cocked as if half listening to somebody enthusing about Star Trek while looking for somebody more interesting and better looking to talk to - it's a pose I recognise - and totally unselfconsciously unaware that she's topless. At a party it's bloke's dilemma number eight; at what point do you tell a woman you are talking to that she is experiencing catastrophic blouse failure (answer - you don't, there is no way that woman is ever, ever going to speak to you again, the atmosphere simply cannot cope with the heat generated by frequent meetings of somebody that embarrassed; so you just have to stand there trying desperately to think of a tactful way of explaining that you're catching an eyeful while simmering in the social hell that you've already delayed too long and she'll think that you're some sort of leering pervert. If you must, the correct way to deal with this is to mention the situation as early as possible in the conversation and do so by commenting either on her tattoo or lack of. Simple.).

What are the chances of that happening?

There are two explanations. The first is that the probability of seeing something related to something I am listening to is actually quite high. '100 objects' is my podcast of choice for my walk home and as my route takes me past a number of shops, and in particular charity shops, it's reasonable that in a podcast about artefacts I'd be walking past something that bears a resemblance to the object being described.

The alternative is that, along with all the other laws and rules that govern the smooth running of the universe, from the way electrons orbit atoms to the way that steam wafts from the open window of a burger van on a cold winter's match day, there's room for a set of rules governing the lives of individuals and the universe ordered the events that led to the circumstance we call 'coincidence'.
And don't worry, that doesn't mean that everything is predetermined - quite the reverse - it means we may possibly have been missing stuff that's been organised for us, like a bloke who nips out for a fag at a stag do and misses the stripper. Everything from missing out on meeting someone significant because you went to the doughnut shack rather than the cafe for breakfast, all the way to missing being centre stage in a natural disaster because you decided not to visit a small Pacific island during asteroid strike season.

Things

BBC radio and the British Museum (could there be a more thoroughly proper combination of bodies? you can practically taste the tea) have combined to bring the listener 'the history of the world in 100 objects'. Essentially this does exactly what it says on the tin (object 74) and attempts to link the evolution of humanity from two million years ago to now to the objects that man has created and used to help this evolution.

This achieves three essential functions, it finally confirms my theory that things are important and can make you happy - geeks everywhere can celebrate that they might not have a girlfriend but they do have an XBox and the latter is more likely to be featured in this series than the object of their impotent lust: the girl who works behind the counter at the newsagents, resulting in a frequency of visits that is borderline stalking and leads to the accumulation of a vast number of unwanted magazines about, for instance, carp fishing (panic buy in desperate attempt to kick start conversation after eighth visit of the weekend).

Secondly, it is one in the eye for creationists. The British Museum is home to a two million year old hand axe, the earliest tool known to man (not counting the ones that do the breakfast show on local radio), excavated from deserts and so on by scientist types. Creationist museums are, if I recall correctly, home to lots of waxworks of bible scenes and pop-eyed loons.

Finally, it delivers the cheery message that we are still evolving. This is not immediately obvious. There's a pretty compelling argument that human regulation peaked in 1974, with space travel and supersonic passenger flight. People in 1974 were actually living in our future (this explains why the sweets were so brightly coloured, now thanks to nanny-knows-best laws about food colouring chemicals, sweets are essentially the same colour as dung. Well, compared to the arrhythmia inducing pallet of the 70s they are).

The objects chosen so far have been a stone cutting tool and a hand axe (described as the Swiss army knife of the stone age and something of an exaggeration, as there is no corkscrew on it) and one of the modern objects later in the series is an Arab credit card. So, essentially, we have evolved from using a rock to chop up antelope meat to using a plastic wafer to chop up lines of coke in a Knightsbridge night club.

The one hundredth object is the subject of a public search and I have no doubt that there will be plenty of nominations. You'll get your environmentalists (or just mentalists) suggesting things that will take forever to decompose in a landfill, like plastic bags, styrofoam burger cartons or Jordan. You'll get organised campaigns to elect some sort of joke object (inevitably, this will involve a facebook campaign. The inventors of facebook must be the most conflicted people on the planet, on the one hand their invention is hugely successful, on the other hand, all the users appear to be enormous gits with too much time on their hands), like anal beads...only to discover these are not a modern invention and were first discovered up some pharaoh (known as 'the smiling mummy') buried three thousand years ago.

There will be many worthy suggestions and I've no doubt that the trend will be modern; somebody will have that 'hey, who could live without one of these' moments and nominate the hat, or the lawnmower or the cricket bail or something.

Me? I'm nominating the ex. In particular the ex you broke up with because, until you found out the meaning of 'passive/aggressive', you simply thought they were immensely irritating. Maybe not an object, but bloody objectionable. And the best thing is, you just know that two million years ago, in a cave in Africa, this conversation took place:
'You're not eating your antelope?'
'I'm not hungry.'
'Oh, OK.'
'OK? OK? That's all you've got so say. You don't care about me at all do you? You don't care about my feelings, what I want.
(Confused) 'I thought you wanted antelope for tea?'
'Oh shut up.'
Thinks: the sooner we evolve beyond this, the better.

Or maybe I'll just nominate the lawnmower.