Almost redundant?

I confess. I don't know if this public phone actually works. I remembered how dirty public phones used to feel and recoiled from actually picking it up. The phone box in which it is housed stands at Toward Point, close to the lighthouse. Its door is no longer there, so I didn't have the well-remembered struggle to open it (they were so heavy!), but the phone itself looked intact and the buttons and electronic display seemed in good nick.

It got me thinking of the days before mobile phones - let alone the tiny powerful computers we all seem to have in our pockets these days. The days when a pay-phone near a lighthouse in an exposed and relatively lonely place might be a life-saver; the days when I used to make the trek to the nearest pay-phone to our holiday house in Brodick to phone the boyfriend who became Mr PB; the days when I arrived in Dunoon during a gloomy March in 1974 and had only the public phone down the road to phone my old life. 

At the time I had a five-week old baby, my first, and I'd never lived more than a mile from my parents; my friends were all in Glasgow; I knew no-one in Dunoon. I stood in that dark, smelly phone-box (remember the smell?) and phoned everyone: a doctor (you always need a doctor when you have your first baby), my mum, the local television shop, whoever it was that provided phones in these days. It was foul.

Within a week I had a television to distract me, a wonderful GP, a new Best Friend, and a phone of my own. Of such little things is a life made up ...