When is the last time that your phone at home rang? I don’t mean your mobile phone – but your landline, the bulky square box with real, 3-D, non-touch buttons and with a number which starts with 21.

At home, it just rang a couple of minutes ago, but that’s because my sister is the only person in Malta who upholds the reverent use of the landline. If the phone rings, you can be sure it’s her. Well, her or the survey chaps from Malta Today asking me who I think is the best person to lead the country.

It has become a fascination of mine, this quiet vanishing act of the landlines. When I go in a household, I subconsciously look for the clunky phone. Most often, I cannot spot it. I have now taken to asking people about it.

“Oh it’s somewhere upstairs, I don’t know if it rings anymore,” they tell me. “It used to be somewhere… where is it now [asks wife]?”; “The line kept going bonkers – it’s now in the children’s toy box”; “Of course I still have it! It’s here [under pile of cushions with the ringer off]”.

Do you remember the time when the phone used to ring incessantly the minute you got home? And you had to answer, because it’s not like you knew who was ringing and you couldn’t send them a text message instead.

My only use for the landline these days is to ring 195, the speaking clock. “Good morning current time is now ten-o-two am.” The automated staccato voice gives me a sense of comfort. Other than for that, I do not lift up the receiver handle, ever. I no longer, for example, dial the directory enquires asking for people’s numbers. I just Google them.

I don’t even memorise anyone’s phone numbers any more. Not even of the person who I think would be best to lead the country. Nothing. All the numbers are stored in the iPhone and I just tell Siri to dial up for me.

If I’m kidnapped and they take my phone away but they give me the chance to call a friend, I’m in trouble. I can’t even beg to be allowed to get my address book out of my bag because the last time I updated my address book was in 1996.

That’s when I used to work at The People in a newsroom with a solitary fax machine, no e-mails, a vast set of dictionaries and thesauruses, three enormous mobile phones for the photographers and lots of ashtrays (it was still legal to chain-smoke yourself to death on your desk back then). Fax machines are museum artefacts now. I rarely see dictionaries and whatever happened to ashtrays?

When is the last time that your phone at home rang?

That was only 20 years ago. It was the time when if I wanted to go abroad, I had to go to a travel agent. Are there still travel agents around? I used to work as one at some point in my life and I remember clients sending me postcards while on their trip – relieved that I didn’t book them a hovel. Do people send postcards anymore? I most certainly don’t. I snap photos, type ‘I’m still alive’ and Whatsapp them.

There’s many other things that are fading in modern travelling. Do you ever buy a map for a car journey? No. That’s what a sat nav is there for. Although, of course, you arrive about three hours later than if you had used a map (“Turn right”, your TomTom tells you – but ‘right’ is blocked for road works; “Turn right”, it keeps insisting as you drive off to take the longest diversion in history of holidays).

I also don’t even buy travel books anymore. I once had a collection of blue-spined Lonely Planet books, which I used to glimpse at affectionately: each mapped my travel adventures, with stubs of bus tickets, or restaurant bills sticking out, cards of people I met along the way, with promises of staying in touch. It was the time when I used to write long, handwritten letters home whenever I used to be away, and then come back and print a bagful of films into a photo album. Where do you go to print a photo these days? Do we still print photos at all?

It’s amazing how in such a short period of time technology has changed the face of our lives. Even how we make tea. People have no need to warm milk or hot water on the stove anymore. “My microwave’s not working! How on earth shall I warm up my soup?!” cried a friend over the phone the other day.

However, I am still baffled by one thing: the clothes iron. Why is the dreaded thing still here? Why hasn’t it too vanished into thin air? How many more decades have to pass before someone invents a mini, portable contraption where you just press a touch button and the shirts get steam-ironed by themselves in a nano second?

… hang on. I’m afraid I have to stop mid-rant. My landline is ringing again. I wonder now, who could it possibly be?

krischetcuti@gmail.com
Twitter: @KrisChetcuti