Hanging on the Telephone

I’ve got a little tin of 1p and 2p coins sitting on my bedside table. They haven’t been touched for several years, a throwback from when they used to be saved rather than lost in the bottom of handbags. I was first influenced by my great-grandma’s habit of collecting all her small change for my brother and me to sort out and hand in at the bank, receiving a few fat pound coins for our efforts. Now it’s a small, dusty, largely neglected collection. Maybe these brown and bronze discs are casualties of the global move towards electronic money. Or maybe I’m just extraordinarily lucky that I’m not in a position where every single penny must count.

The 2p coins also symbolize a generational shift. Take a step back to the seventies and they were currency for communication. My mum held onto every one she could find, for use in the local phone box. 10p’s worth was enough for a proper conversation. She’d arrange with her best friend for both to convene in phone boxes at the same time so that one might ring the other. At a point when the only household phone would be in the living room or hall, these small red booths provided a chance to chat privately. Coins became tokens, required for the kind of exchange that now seems unbelievably archaic.

Quizzing anyone of a different age on their past is like dipping into a museum. Details are illuminated, but still hidden behind the glass of another’s memory.  “And then, of course, the pips would go” is a logical sentence to my mum – but one requiring explanation for the daughter used to a smartphone. “Oh, when the money ran out, a series of fast beeps would sound,” she adds. “You could just about talk over them. If you had no money left then you’d have to say goodbye quickly before the line went dead. If you did have more then you had to feed in the next coin in before you were cut off.”

Compare this with packages of minutes, megabytes and texts today. The transition from physical locations to portable devices is quite extraordinary, and far removed from my mum’s teenage years where a small ledger and stopwatch sat next to the home phone. The time and type of each call had to be recorded. As she says, “You were charged by the minute. You’d watch carefully until it got to 45 seconds so that you had just enough time to say goodbye and hang up before it hit the next minute. We noted whether it was local or long distance. Long distance cost more.” Her mother (my late grandma) would work out how much had been spent each week, so that she might have the right amount ready to pay at the Post Office when the phone bill was delivered. So woe betide anyone who forgot to use the stopwatch. The only similarity you might find now is in parents discovering that their teenage child has drastically gone over the number of texts or downloads allocated monthly, yielding a large surplus charge. But it’s a poor comparison. We have possibilities at our fingertips quite alien to the 20^th Century.

Smart phones are (arguably) a good safety net to encourage independence, the knowledge that others are only a phone call away allowing adventures further afield. There are maps for navigating cities, texts for spur-of-the-moment trips otherwise impossible and Google for finding out just how good the nearest cafe's flat white is. But it’s easy to get a little too complacent about how much time this phone can spend in one's hand. It’s a tool for contact, work, emails, entertainment, news, music and heavy doses of procrastination. Some of us, myself included, struggle to turn off the phone even at home, hooked in to updates and new messages. If one is plugged into the ever-shifting, ever-rolling surge of social media, it can feel odd or even daunting to pull free. But in that oddness there’s liberation. The modern reliance on being able to contact others (or be contacted) at all times can be exhilarating, but also exhausting and needlessly time-consuming.

It’s easy to idealize the past, envy my mum growing up at a time where she cycled the long journey to school by herself at an early age; took off with teenage friends for impromptu picnics without telling anyone, and only talked with others through the post box, phone box or face to face. It’s unsurprising that the value of vintage clothes and objects is still rising, emblematic of a kind of collective nostalgia for times we didn’t live through. But if presented with the choice, I’d still prefer to be a young adult now. A little more current inventiveness, openness and spontaneity wouldn’t go amiss of course; a little less emphasis on online status. But perhaps it’s a question of harnessing and actively choosing how to use our unprecedented communication opportunities, rather than passively consuming.

Many of those phone boxes are now outdated. Some still function, but the spider-webs woven across corners and doorways demonstrate the lack of use. In the countryside they are red beacons of a previous age; last chance possibilities for the desperate driver whose phone has died; objects appreciated for aesthetic rather than pragmatic reasons. I hope that they remain though. These fading boxes, once bright crimson, dot the hills near home. They are monuments to past modes of communication, ivy creeping over the glass.

These photos were taken last summer by Florence Fox. I need to find some new adjectives beyond 'fabulous' to describe her, but that one is particularly fitting. I'm wearing my maternal grandfather's 'dinner' trousers and waistcoat, with a second hand shirt, vintage silk top hat and men's brogues (that give me awful blisters). 
A few months ago the top photo was one of four winning images for Flo in the Guardian's 'Camera Club Dulux competition' - see the feature here, and the online version of the Weekend magazine write-up here. 

And talking of competitions, it was such a delight to be a part of the first ever green carpet catwalk event at the Observer Ethical Awards 2014. I modelled a delectable Katie Jones knit number. You can see a picture of me and the other models on Vogue's Green Style Blog. 

Congratulations to sustainable shoe design winners Beyond Skin (with their designs strutted down the carpet by the ever-so-charming stylist Grace Woodward). I also had the pleasure of meeting Mak Gilchrist, whose motto is: "trailblazing fashion model once considered 'difficult', now championed as 'ethical'", as well as model and (very) funny writer Rebecca Pearson, whose words have appeared online in places including The Vagenda and Sabotage Times.   

Hanging on the Telephone 2014-06-25T08:11:00-07:00 Rating: 4.5 Diposkan Oleh: Unknown