These red phone boxes are becoming increasingly rare in England, just as the enclosed telephone booths are here. So natch we had to snap a piccy of this iconic structure when I was there a few weeks ago. I guess they're not that practical anymore given the more portable, non-enclosed versions of public telephones, but the old-fashioned gal in me reverences the telephone booth: to me, it harkens back to a time when we valued personal space, generally and in the public realm. Today we carry on highly personal conversations on our cell phones in public, blog about our lives to people across the world, and Twitter with peeps we've never met face-to-face. We're not just a disembodied culture; we're so accustomed to putting ourselves out there we've completely eroded our own privacy. The sacred and increasingly absent space of the telephone booth is one small sign of that collapse, methinks.
This rotary phone, also red, is another icon I feel slightly nostalgic over. I grew up with a black rotary phone and loved that self-satisfied feeling when you just dialed the crap out of the phone. And the quaint bring bring! bring bring! noise when it rang - love it. I used this phone for a short while but had to unplug is at as I couldn't access my voice mail with the old phone. Now I'm thinking of doing away with a land-line phone altogether. Sigh.
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