On And Off The Phone

I've spent a fair amount of my life without direct access to a telephone. I don't think we got a phone until we moved into the shop at Guide Lane, so that's the first eight years of my life taken care of. Access to a phone was extremely limited at university, though I'm not too sure if we (myself and the four other students I lived with) had one when we were in digs in my second and third years. I certainly didn't have one in the little room I occupied when I started teaching. And I can't picture the phone I assume I had at Ellerton Road when I was finally in a house of my own. I don't think phones loomed very large in my life.

When I came to Singapore I was taken aback at just how much of a necessity access to a phone was regarded as by all and sundry. Which is by way of a prelude to recording the fact that, once again, our phone line at Maison KL decided not to function, and I found that enormously irritating. We're now actively considering ways to bypass the system in terms of getting on the Internet and simply function using the array of handphones possessed by the missus.

Mind you, there's also something curiously comforting in being quite cut-off from the world. Sort of anti-social-networking, I suppose. I realised just how much of a hermit I can be when a chap in a workshop I one attended sagely pointed out that everyone feels the need to answer a ringing phone when I knew with a deep, dark certainty that my every instinct is to ignore the darn thing.