When something becomes old and then new again during my lifetime, I might be forgiven for feeling at once quite aged and a little sentimental.

But suggestions that the landline telephone may be having a cultural renaissance just make me feel old and somewhat triggered by experiences of fraught teenage social negotiations over the long obsolete rotary dial phone of my youth.

I remember vividly the first time a girl called 14-year-old me at my family home on the landline. My mother answered the phone which sat on a bench in a book-lined downstairs room we reverentially called “the den” which included a special shelf for the White and Yellow Pages (remember them?). Mum gave this caller the third degree – who was she and what did she want? – before eventually summoning me to the phone to name the “very forward” girl asking to speak to me.

Kill me now. Just the memory …

That was the thing about the landline. It pretty much ensured that parents and siblings could glean way too much about any fledgling romantic and social interactions just as we learned a lot about our parents because of a) the people........

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