National Telephone Day.

 National Telephone Day.

You have to be joking surely. This is not National Telephone Day. But it is you know. Where on earth would we be without the telephone? Lost, you suspect, lacking in complete communication with the outside world. More so than ever the phone has become not only essential but also a fashion accessory, a vital connection with both your family and friends, almost critical to the way we are since without a phone you're simply forgotten, neglected, an outcast, no longer regarded as quite as popular as you might have been five minutes ago but nonetheless deeply loved and respected. 

A phone though is your invisible window on the world, a voice from another location but still important and  valued by people as recognisable and familiar, urgent at times but less so than other moments. Most of us can go through a whole day on both a landline number or now that celebrated piece of high tech gadgetry with Apps, What's Up facilities, games galore, recipes should you want them, card games, personal and family numbers and the whole spectrum of online websites that have now transformed our every day life.

It occurs to you that the great Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone and engineer supreme would have been enormously flattered at the remarkable popularity of the phone. It's hard to believe that some of us would never be able to function without the phone although without that absolutely necessary dialogue with the people we love, you suspect nothing would ever be achieved. Besides, what harm are you doing, only chatting, conversing, telling them that you'll meet them outside the bus stop next to Marks and Spencer and you'll try to get there in time. But if you don't happen to make it then you shouldn't worry and nor should they.

Nowadays phones are hugely fashionable marketing campaigns in all areas of our lives both on TV, radio, street advertising hoardings and in almost every coat, trousers and shirt pocket conceivable. We walk around the streets and roads attached to our phone, ears tenderly clutching that small piece of equipment that holds the key to earnest business meetings, school runs, hospital appointments, a constant aid to our daily shopping habits and the most common of sights in every commercial outlet you can possibly think of.

Of course we need to keep in touch and the opinion from here is that we do need to know how the rest of the world is doing and maintain some semblance of contact with work colleagues, cherished family and friends and anybody else you may care to think of. But the telephone is slowly turning into a compulsive habit, an obsession from time to time but a genuine necessity when the mood takes us. It is no longer just the landline at home nor is it a last resort when your miles away from those you may want to ring immediately.

The telephone now is an integral part of our furniture, the background mood music of our lives when all around is all enveloping silence. We somehow feel obliged to hold indefinite conversations on buses, crossing roads and streets, standing in doorways but perhaps dangerously oblivious to our surroundings. How many times have you found yourself strolling down the street without a care in the world and then that world becomes threatened by needless distractions? Before you can look up and find your bearings somebody will casually walk straight into you without any recognition of your existence. In other words it was your fault that there might have been an accident while they protest their innocence.

But today it's time to pay a warm homage to the telephone and a word or thousand of praise to Alexander Graham Bell, the Scotsman who may have had a light bulb moment well over a century or so while tucking into his porridge. Bell must have been a shrewd visionary, perhaps suspecting that the concept of talking to people would indeed catch on in a big way at some point in the future. So he fixed all of the wires into the right electrical socket, manufactured an object that had massive potential and then sat back as the adulation poured in from a grateful public.

Sadly there are advantages and disadvantages to the new brand of I Phones, Smart Phones and the phones that just keep ringing even when you're trying to drop off to sleep. We have been told repeatedly that if you stare at a phone screen for any length of time late at night your sleeping patterns could be regularly disrupted because your eyes need sleep rather than the harsh light of your mobile phone. 

But how many of us have been tempted to spend all night just surfing through a million websites of any description. It can't be denied they do have the capacity to ruin us as the land of shut eye becomes fundamental to our health so it may be advisable to have a late night natter during the day rather than damage our body clock. We keep telling ourselves that those office e-mails that had to be dealt with immediately can always be responded to in the morning but then it had to be done so now rather than later.

Then there are the innumerable up to date models, the new Nokias, the scintillating Samsungs, the Car Warehouse creations that can do so many things that its contemporaries just can't do. There are also the mobile phone warehouses, Internet cafes, queues of people standing patiently outside shops desperate for a better class of phones with an abundance of Gigs, sim cards that work almost immediately. And then there are the car phones, a controversial subject since many of us have to work and talk on the phone while travelling to some destination. None of us can ever gauge the true importance of the phone but the sight of somebody with a mobile in one hand and the other on a steering wheel does look quite disturbing.

Still, it's National Telephone Day folks. Three cheers to the one household object that seems to have a mind of its own. A couple of days ago we had one of those epic seconds or minute. A national security and emergency ring buzzed through to the entire population of Great Britain and quite possibly the world. It smacked of George Orwell's classic novel 1984 when all the clocks started ticking and Winston Smith was but a lad in shorts. Happy National Telephone Day everybody and don't forget to give us a bell, as Alexander Graham may well have said.