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My daughter Holly is constantly complaining about her mobile phone, wanting to upgrade it, wanting something better. We didn’t let her have a phone until she was thirteen and you should have heard he complain – all of her friends had mobiles, all of her friends had had mobiles since they were ten.

When I was her age we didn’t have a phone. I’m not talking about a mobile - I’m taking about any phone, we didn’t have a phone in the house. If we wanted to make a call we went to the phone box half a mile down the road and dialled using your dialling finger in the holes on the silver dial. There were no numbers stored in the phones so you usually went to the phone box clutching a scrap of paper with the number, usually a very short one, scrawled on it. I remember pressing button ‘B’ to return my unused money, I remember talking to the operator for free to get a number, I remember that the phone boxes were always clean and in perfect working order… ‘Operator, name and address please.’

Our first phone was grey. It had a dial, and a curly cord, and sat proudly on the telephone cabinet my Uncle Len built to hide the gas meter in our hall. Uncle Len wasn’t a carpenter but he knew a thing or to about wood and nails and wood stain, so he built us one just like the one he’d built for himself. There was no plan - he just made it up as he went along, a true craftsman.

We had a party line, which meant that we shared a line with somebody else who we didn’t know. It kept the cost down and in those days you didn’t use the phone very often, so only occasionally did you pick up the phone to hear some stranger talking about Auntie Jessie and her hysterectomy or how poor Timmy had got stuck up a tree and they’d had to call the fire brigade. ‘Sorry’ you’d say before rapidly replacing the receiver - unless you thought you could get away with listening for a while as I sometimes did.

I used to love dialling the speaking clock (at the first pip it will be…), the weather, directory enquiries, the operator - and they were all FREE. But it was when I started dialling Dial-a-Disc to listen to the number one chart topper of the day pop-pickers that the phone lock appeared. There was a charge for Dial-a-Disc. The phone lock was a shiny circular barrel that fitted into the last finger hole of the dial preventing the dial from turning - so after that I had to ask my dad for the key before I could make a call AND put some money in the box for the privilege. It took me weeks of practice to work out how to open the phone lock with a customised paper clip - I got there, thirty eight paper clips later, in the end though.

I’ll never forget the day our trimphone was delivered. It was a momentous occasion with the neighbours and all the family coming around to admire it. Auntie Kate and Uncle Len, Auntie Lena and Uncle Ian, Auntie Lucy and Charlie, Auntie Mu and Uncle Bob, my Gran, my cousins – Linda, Mary, Ian, Gina, Jane, Lynsey, Judith, Alison, Sue, not Leslie though - the Taylors, the Smiths, the Robinsons – they all came around to admire the wonder that was our Trimphone.

It was so sleek, so modern, so two tone green, so angular, so very much now – it still had a dial and holes for your fingers but it didn’t bringggg bringggg it brrrrrrrr brrrrrrrrrred – so much more satisfying. We were quite the trendsetters in our road for a while but it wasn’t long before everyone had replaced their old phones with a Trimphone.

My dad still locked it up though, and I still picked the lock with my paper clip – until he caught me… but that’s another story.