When I were a lad... Telephones

The rarity of British telephones in the 1960s and 70s is evident from their four digit numbers

The strangest thing about British life about fifty years ago, as it strikes present day teens and young adults, and also people of even my own age from the USA; was that we hardly ever used telephones. 

Although phones had been invented in Victorian times, and there was a UK national network from 1870 - a century-plus later in the 1970s and early 80s, they were still uncommon and rarely used. 

Through my childhood we had a phone, necessary for my Father's work (although my wife's family did not have one), but the line (although not the number) was shared with a neighbour. 

After leaving home and going to medical school, I could only use one of the rare coin-operated pay-phones provided (at a frequency of something like one instrument per two or three hundred students); or on the streets. 

These needed to be queued for, and were very expensive - such that a maximum three minute call home, once a week, was normal. 

I was 22 years old before I had a telephone in the student rented flat; and even then it was seldom used because of the cost. 

Yet I was stunned during my 1980 two month student elective in the USA and Canada, to find people chatting for hours on the phones - which had incredibly long electric cords so they could be moved around the house in use. 

At home, by contrast, we had to stand-up beside a shelf in the hallway to use the instrument.  

The reason why this technology was so rare and expensive even a century after its development was not, I think, due to British national characteristics directly - not due to an aversion to such technology or communications. After all; telephones were very quickly adopted and became nigh ubiquitous from the later 1980s when phone usage became cheaper and installation more rapid.

(Margaret Thatcher's doing.)  

But this national trait was, more likely, indirectly caused by the constraints of nationalized provision, and the restrictive practices associated with a strongly corporate and unionized social set-up. 

The same constraints, in other words, that have kept most aspects of UK NHS medical provision so scarce and slow/impossible to access - and chronically-worsening; although nowadays this is due to managerialism rather than trade unionism. The NHS is a residue of the bad-old lifestyle of the British. 

All this meant that human contact in the 60s and 70s was almost wholly face-to-face, or by letter; and for many people there were frequent and long periods without conversational interaction. 

Thus, the hour-by-hour and week-by-week texture and quality of life was very different indeed then; as compared with now - in ways that can hardly be imagined, and have faded from memory even among those who experienced them. 

There are pros as well as cons of more frequent and cheap communicating, of course; yet one advantage of those remote days of the 1970s is that people were almost compelled to think more often than now. 

For us, for the past three or four decades especially, distraction has become a way of life, a continuous-infusion of psychotherapy and stimulus.

And the most powerful form of distraction is (for the "human animal") social distraction. 

All of which explains a great deal that is most unfixably-wrong about our Western civilization; as it sleepwalks into oblivion, or delusionally marches towards annihilation - while avidly-focused on a mixture of trivia and lies.