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A dying breed!!!!!

A picture of a simple telephone box taken on a recent trip to Callendar in Scotland.

Why bother to take this photo you might think?

It is an example of an authentic telephone box which has in it, as you might expect, a public telephone. It has been vandalised and not repaired. What is does not contain is a person using the telephone 😉

However, prior to taking this photo I was walking up the high street in Calendar and saw about 5 people with a mobile phone to their ear – one of whom was driving a car at the time
(illegal!!!!). So I take this to be a sign of the times.

Technology is progressing at an unprecedented rate and the increase in the use of mobile telephony is I think one measure of this situation. Today there are few children – let alone adults who do not have a mobile telephone. I can recall in my life time having to make calls through the telephone operator – there was not even a dialling device on the phone in my childhood home. The line was also a ‘party line’ which means that it was shared with the house next door. So it was not unusual to pick up the phone and hear our neighbour in mid conversation with someone else. Of course in those days we accepted that and simply put the phone down again. No real worries about privacy in those days ( approx 40 – 45 years ago).

The telephone box in the picture above is an original one painted in post office red! I have also seen these in people’s gardens as ornaments but this one still survives in its original (0r near) state.