How the phone colonised my life

I read recently that this month marks 40 years since Britain’s first mobile phone call was made. It was in the early hours of New Year’s Day 1985 in Parliament Square, when one Michael Harrison rang his Vodafone chairman father, Sir Ernest Harrison.

A few years later, one sunny Saturday morning, my father took delivery of his first company car. I must have been about ten years old and can recall the sheer thrill of seeing something outside our house that wasn’t one of my mother’s seemingly endless succession of Volvos. (She recently threw us a real curveball, trading in her phosphorescent green Volvo V70R for a beige Kia Venga, which is apparently preferable for pensioner posture and more conducive to problem-free digestion.) My father’s new car was nothing less than a Vauxhall Senator. Its main attraction – at least for my brother and me as avaricious children of the 1980s – was that this burgundy beast had a carphone.

Despite his fondness for Maggie, my father was perhaps otherwise out of kilter with his times. He had no interest in cars (which presumably explains the Senator) and still less in technology, so the naffness of the car and the innovation of the carphone were entirely wasted on him. (The television controls for our terrestrial set with three, occasionally four, channels – all with terrible ghosting – would reduce him to puce rage and blasphemous mutterings.) So I don’t really remember his mastering the carphone very much, though my brother, who’d otherwise spent his entire childhood building aircraft carriers out of wooden bricks, liked to try to sit in the car while it was parked outside and call my mother in the kitchen.

I quickly got over the novelty of the carphone, and my teenage years were spent being woefully uncool – laughing like a storm drain with friends until it hurt (on one memorable occasion we peed ourselves), gooning after boys we’d met once but were sure were realistic marriage prospects, and complaining about the injustices visited upon us by teachers and matrons.

Most popular

Philip Collins

Trump will now be judged like any other politician

Julie Burchill

Neil Gaiman and the misogyny of the geeks

Gareth Roberts

The strangeness and sanity of Donald Trump

It would, of course, take many years – and much hankering and hysteria – before I got my own mobile. When I arrived at university, I found that some incredibly sophisticated types were in possession of their very own, London stock-sized phone. My now-husband, Patrick, was the first such person I encountered. He’d been at Westminster, which seemed to convent boarding school-educated me incredibly urban, and he brandished a Nokia – encased in faux leather – while riding a child’s BMX, sporting baggy checked trousers and absurd trainers. He pretty swiftly traded up for a lurid yellow flip phone that he still has stashed away in some drawer.

One by one, my friends began to acquire mobile phones. By the Christmas holidays in my second year, I was desperate. Desperate, but also on thin ice, as I’d been overspending and underachieving. So my mother stood firm, reasoning that I didn’t need one and that it would only be a distraction. Instead, Father Christmas brought me a pager. (She has always derived a gleefully perverse kick from using presents as weapons; when I’d asked for a Walkman, she gave me a dictaphone to record revision notes.)

I did, of course, eventually become the proud owner of a mobile phone – predictably a Nokia – and it changed my life. Back then, all I really needed it for was talking to friends about which pub to meet at in five minutes. Today I’d struggle to be without it for more than a few hours, as, like many of us, my daily routine is predicated upon immediate access to messages, emails, credit cards, weather reports, and transport updates.

But I recall with relief how different it was when I was young. How much rather I’d have a phone-free world for my own daughters than the virtual yoke of oppression to which they’ve submitted. Their mobiles act like their very own bespoke Pied Piper. Covid and lockdowns conspired to deprive them of each other’s company at the stage at which they’re programmed to seek it most, while social media algorithms have been fine-tuned to act as psychological crack cocaine.

Walk into a café or a park, and you’ll see teenagers sitting together in silence gazing at their phones while only intermittently speaking to each other – often to share an Instagram reel. Their social interactions are almost entirely virtual: when they say that these days everyone knows everyone, they’re not lying – it’s just that they have a different understanding of what that means. Knowing someone is merely being ‘friends’ on Snapchat or connected on TikTok, and it must be exhausting having to keep up. I know from my own teenager and her friends what youthful promise and charm they have – even the grumpy ones. I wonder now if I’d have greeted that Senator carphone with such wide-eyed excitement if I’d realised what it would do to the next generation of young people.