Telephone free landslide victory

[hirez]

In the place where I grew up (pop. 4 + a cat), the phones were Bakelite, came with knitted cables that connected them to bell-boxes via immense multi-way plugs, and were probably installed some time in the thirties. There was also a strident external bell fitted to an outside wall of the house that could probably be heard the other side of the valley. Since those were the phones (there were a number of ur-phone-points dotted about the house, presumably installed at vast expense by men from the GPO) that were used by ma & pa, I took it that all telephones were like that. (Just as all grandfathers had one ear)

What I didn't realise, until last week in fact, was that I'd been living in an odd kind of telecoms time-capsule. Telephones had moved on in the world outside Holt Farm, and it was with a kind of ugly lurch that we moved four miles and forty years in(to) the mid seventies.

However, this left a hole in the timeline. One that smelled of warm Bakelite, phenolic and HTP. It takes the form of one of these.

Elsewhere on LJ, there are people who speak of 'soft places' (I'm not going into more detail than that because my interpretation is likely not as the originator would wish, but I guess that's in the nature of ideas; once you've emitted them, you can no more own them than you can own the wind.), while the more I think about them and the strangely layered nature of reality, the more I think there are 'soft machines'.

Ok, in the strictly Burroughsian sense - if there can be any such thing given the plastic nature of  his work - I at least tend to understand that he was talking about humans. However, I'd like to overload that phrase to mean 'Objects that are able to function as localised reality modifiers'.

Y'see, I have a 300-series telephone. It's actually one of the Portuguese variants that's been hacked about enough to work with modern BT circuitry, which I suspect gives it a lot more power. Without that mod, the object would be marooned in its own time, but it's been unceremoniously dragged into the tail-end of the 20th century when people still wanted novelty landline phones, so has something like twenty or thirty years of potential energy stored in its Bakelite casing. Thus it emits the densest cloud of Fifties I've ever encountered. I get the feeling that if it should be triggered it'll drag itself and anything else in the general area back to when it considers home with all the dispatch of a lead ingot falling down a mineshaft.

I suspect there are more of these things and that they're related to Tulpas, but I'm not sure how as yet.

I also have a shiny new Nokia, but since I'm a contrary bugger I've not got a new number. If you've got it, that's good. If you've not, that's good too.

Comments

[edwards.livejournal.com]

I used to love the old GPO unit where I played in Tuxford. Other than the evolution of vans from 1980, from the HA Viva and those strange Commer/Dodge vans to the more usual transits, the exhange was still full of clattery relay boards - however, on the other side on a back lane which led to the railway line, there was an older substation - which had the original relays inside it and was still functional.

Siani's dad worked on the 'phones at some point in the past. Sadly I'm not knowledgeable enough to get any benefit from his stories beyond "Hee, how lovely and easy to understand for engineers".

[quercus.livejournal.com]

Ah, the Commer van. The only vehicular transport _worse_ than a Transit. Front wheels that were narrower than the back, and set behind the steering wheel. Anyone who could reverse park one of those horors was the sort of chap who could do Rubik's cubes blindfold.

(I was a BT Spod in the early '80s)

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

Kevin ran one of those for a few years, as a tiny camper. He was very fond of it, as I recall.

But it rotted. Badly.