Dear LPG,

How things have changed.  Most people who are of the age that LPG, by virtue of its name, aims to cater for, will remember a time when making a telephone call was something most of us needed to leave home to do.  They began to become a commodity that one would have at home in the early 1900’s although only the very rich had one then.  The phone box at the bottom of the road was the place where most people would be found making a telephone call.  In those days, telephone calls did not last too long as they were made while the callers were standing up, sometimes in the English winter, and often after waiting for a queue of people to make their conversations before it was your turn with coins in hand and thoughts of pressing button ‘A’ or button ‘B’.

It was the early 1960s before my parents got their first telephone at our home, but work and school kept conversations fairly short.  It seemed like not long after that, characters like James Bond and the men from Uncle started making their top secret telephone conversations from rather large brick-like phones as they were driven from A to B in their cars and by the time I became a telephone operator in the early 1980’s many people had one that they could carry around with them. 

I remember writing to you about my experience of one valentine’s day in the mid-1980s  (►►►) when I delivered valentines messages as a part of my job.   While I worked as an operator, I remember predicting that we would all have given up our land lines by now but there are still just about as many of each in the world.

I can remember telling my mum and aunts that they spent far too long nattering on the phone when I was young and when there was still a telephone box on every other street in the borough.   We have all spent the past twenty years getting used to seeing people talking to themselves as they walk down the street with their wired and Bluetooth earpieces attached. 

Many of us older people have been of the opinion that the mobile ones  are annoying, as we tap our grandchildren on the shoulder in order to get their attention, because their sense of hearing is preoccupied with their latest choice of music. I have to say that I have problems with bits sticking out of my ears, but the ability to see who you are talking to is something I would miss if I had to go back to just talking and listening to those friends and family whom we cannot see.

I bet that most of us have learned the value of the long conversation over the last twelve months.  We have to acknowledge how much telephones, regardless of whether they are attached to a wire, can only be used at home or whether they are able to be taken anywhere you go and do a lot more than allow you to talk to someone far away, they were truly appreciated while we were all locked down last spring.

With all this in mind I want to champion the telephone in all its guises and remind readers that today is National Telephone Day in the USA, but perhaps we all owe the invention a little vote of approval.

AJ, Lewisham.

AJ shares some related information found on the internet …

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