A telephone of the kind from my childhood; squat and solidly plastic, its face and reciever resplendent in rich cream against the candy pink of its body. It has a rotary dial so slow and deliberate, you would burn in your bed long before the third nine had ever clicked back into place. The old fashioned ring is sonorous and so profound, I suspect it to be at least partly responsible for the lamentable quantity of subsidance in my flat.

I adore my telephone. I love the little circle of paper in the middle of its dial that informs me that should I ever need it, the operator's number is 100, and I love the peculiar kink in the middle of it's curly flex that not even a mathematical modelling student friend of mine could put right. I love the way that no matter how hard anyone tries, its ring will never sound like anything that should be accompanied by a video with woman falling out of tight shorts and I especially love the way it once managed to tangle its lead round the foot of an ex-boyfriend, turning his superior stalk from the room into a forehead smashing stumble into the door lintel.

We are meant to be, my telephone and I. And yet.

It sits neglected in the corner of my living room, dusty but uncomplaining, ever hopeful that the next time its urgent bell rumbles through the flat I'll rush breathlessly to it and answer the caller with glee. It longs to be spoken into. It aches for its reciever to be picked up eagerly and cradled between hand and ear. It's such a splendid telephone. It just wants me to use it for the purpose it was created.

But I never do. I love my telephone, but I hate telephones.

I hate the peremptory summons their ring heralds, the interruption by anyone who cares to do so. I hate the unforgiving silences, unnoticible in person but which on the phone invites either babble and inanity or curious awkwardness. I hate the lack of visual clues, the small yet pestering worry that the other person is at that very moment skewering their eyes out with boredom at my idea of light, urbane chat. I hate wondering if anyone I might care to call might resent the interruption as much as I probably would.

But you can't explain this well to a 1970s telephone.

I do not feel this guilty with my mobile. Its arrival was long resisted and I have never warmed to the unwelcome unease of being constantly contactable that it brought into my life. When it isn't being stolen and sniggering behind my back as it runs up five hundred pound bills with hour long calls to Angola, it is only ever used for sending messages that I've overslept / swallowed a contact lens / broken something and am being taken to hospital and will therefore be a bit late. I look aghast at people on buses, marvelling at the unselfconsious way they broadcast the dullest minutae of their lives to everyone around them, and accept its prediliction for hiding itself down the back of the sofa for days in revenge for my refusal to do the same.

But my telephone just sits there patiently, waiting for the day when I will decide to call up a girl friend and spend three hours painting my toenails and rating all the boys we know on a scale of one to ten. I can't do it, I really can't, but oh, I feel dreadful.