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If someone is beside you as you take the call, you’re free to raise your eyebrows heavenwards, yawningly tap your lips or else mimic the sort of wind-up gesture that TV producers make when a talk-show guest starts to outstay his welcome – and your interlocutor is none the wiser.For the telephone is blind. And, as I myself know from personal experience (my father lost his sight when I was a child), we are less wary, less suspicious, less watchful, when speaking to the blind than to those who have eyes to see us blush and squirm and wriggle and lie. If we knew, when we picked up the phone, that we were going to be given the once-over, we would most likely end up making far fewer calls, certainly fewer personal, non-professional ones.Which is why, were it ever phased out altogether, if it were ever replaced by the sort of TV- or videophone whose advent has been eternally promised and eternally deferred, it would be nothing short of a catastrophe. A catastrophe for all of us, but especially for those helpline counsellors who will sometimes find themselves, like mountaineers on a precipitous slope, roped together on the phone-wire with potential suicides. Were it merely a question of the phone’s capacity to facilitate and accelerate human contact, that would be reason enough to bless its existence. But it has also transformed the way in which we confront the world and each other in it.The supreme convenience of the telephone is that – as Truman Capote said of masturbation – you don’t have to dress up for it. Of how many other technological marvels could one make the same claim?That the telephone has irreversibly changed our lives is the tritest of truisms.

Yet in an era where the growth of information technology is so vertiginously boundless we can scarcely keep up with it, it’s become easy to forget how true the truism is. If, in one of its typically enigmatic billboards, Silk Cut teases the passer-by with the image of a white-gloved finger sinisterly tapping the cradle of a phone, then it, too, is inevitably one of the original classic black models. If there’s a telephone exchange in Heaven, if God has a hotline to Satan, as Kennedy had to Kruschev, then one just knows what sort it’s got to be. Nothing could better illustrate its significance in the modern world than the fact that there continues to exist, for all of us, a Platonically idealised conception of the thing, absolute and unchanging. Yet, even if we all have sleek touch- tone systems, sophisticated answering machines, call-waiting facilities, faxes and digitally detailed bills, even if it’s white or crimson or Jacuzzi- tap gold-leaf, the telephone will forever be, as an icon, the kind of no-nonsense, old-fangled, black Bakelite object owned by my elderly acquaintance (just as the sky, though sometimes grey and sometimes red and sometimes eggshell white, will always be archetypally blue).If a company’s phone number is illustrated by a tiny graphic icon on its letter-headed writing paper, then hers is the phone that is always used.

It has a symmetrical, twin- bulbed receiver that sits mannishly astride the instrument’s pyramidal base rather than demurely side-saddle, as is the case with most current models of the same species of object, and on its triangular facade there’s a movable disk which you rotate by inserting a finger into any one of a sequentially numbered series of circular apertures that are distributed at regular intervals about its outer rim.
If you managed to hack your way through the grotesquely prolix thickets of that poker-faced description, you’ll have gathered that what I’m referring to is a telephone. And though, as you’ll also have gathered, it’s something of a museum piece, it still works. I asked her if I could try it out, because I wanted to see what sort of nostalgic frisson it would give me from being obliged, after so many years, actually to dial a number!The telephone is now in its “mannerist” or “decadent” phase It now comes in every conceivable shape and size. And the questionable relevance and quality of many items lessens their long term appeal. “A book or video of the ad is little more than a promotional gimmick, and don’t believe anyone who tells you anything else It’s here today, gone tomorrow.”. You can use it to shop anywhere in the world, to conduct affairs of the heart and of business, even to have sex – no dressing up required And your mother complains when you don’t use it.

In the following pages, we celebrate the telephone, one of the happier modern inventions, an instrument of intimacy. As Gilbert Adair says in our opening essay, when it comes to the telephone, two’s company and three is always a crowd

I have an elderly acquaintance who is still in possession of a certain heavy, coal-black Bakelite object that was originally installed in her Chelsea maisonette half a century ago. “If too many items are produced, future desirability will be dampened by over-supply,” he explains. And it lessens the potential for products to eventually become collectables, Opie says. Little Nineties ephemera will still be around in a year’s time, let alone 50, believes Robert Opie who runs the History of Packaging Museum in Gloucester Guinness’ earliest appeal was built on illustrator John Gilroy’s menagerie of Guinness-guzzling animals which appeared on posters in the Twenties and Thirties. Guinness then developed a range of memorabilia primarily for promotion in pubs – in the Forties and Fifties and it is many of these products which enjoy particular enduring appeal.Although the company today manages a comprehensive merchandising operations with its own shop and visitor’s heritage centre in Dublin, it has also moved with the times – latest spin-off products include a Guinness computer screen saver featuring the dancing man well-known from a recent cinema and TV advertising campaign.Even so, the mass-produced approach invariably runs counter to attempts to manufacture a cult. “The appeal is really very simple” Christiie’s spokeswoman Jill Potterton explains “Individually, Guinness-ware is highly affordable.

Overall, it is especially popular thanks to its design and the fact that advertising- ware in general is fast becoming a highly collectable area.”
Creating hype to stimulate a cult following is one thing – witness the number of household products currently offering logo emblazoned ‘collectables’ – but generating appeal that stands the test of time, for financial or nostalgic reasons, is quite another. Items for sale will range from a set of Carlton Ware Toucan lamps, each valued at pounds 500, to cuff-links and Toucan wallpaper. For the moment customers appear satisfied with the traditional arrangement of telephoning with requirements and paying on delivery. Guinness, as the old saying goes, is good for you And for your bank balance too, it seems. A collection of Guinness advertising ephemera is expected to raise more than pounds 50,000 when auctioned by Christie’s next week, Wednesday September 11. Back in the Seventies it worked for Fred, Homepride’s graded grain man. Once immortalised in plastic, replica flour shakers quickly infiltrated kitchens across the land.