My colleague recently alerted me to a telephone box graveyard - a place in North Yorkshire where decommissioned red telephone boxes end up.

The iconic boxes are renovated and bought, at substantial sums, by those who knew and loved them.

It set me thinking about how many hours my friends and I used to spend in the telephone box in the village where I grew up. On a corner near the village shop and Post Office, the robust little structure sheltered us from rain, as we huddled inside, three or four of us at a time.

Once inside we would mess with the phone, using all its free services, directory enquiries - making up silly surnames - and the speaking clock.

Sometimes, when it wasn’t raining, we would go inside just for something to do. The door was heavy and stiff and we sometimes struggled to hold it open as we squeezed ourselves inside.

I recall one member of our gang clambering on top of it after dark and sitting there for a good hour while callers - oblivious to his presence - used the phone. We were lurking across the street laughing.

When I was older, I remember using it to call my boyfriend because I hated using the house phone. He would reverse the charges to the phone box and I would pretend to be the householder and accept.

Sometimes, a queue would form outside the box, and people would glare inside, stamping their feet in the cold. One woman told my mum, who grilled me about why I wasn’t using the phone in our house, just a minute’s walk away.

When I think back, quite a lot of people in the village didn’t have a phone and used the box regularly.

York Press:

Crimson classic: a row of traditional red telephone boxes

How things have changed. Now I, and millions of others, would struggle to remember how to use a public phone box. Younger generations would not have a clue.

We are, however, returning to the days when not everyone has a home phone - many people use only mobiles. I cannot remember the last time my daughters used the house phone - they sneer at the very idea. I don’t think they have ever used a phone box. “They smell of wee,” one said.

Sadly, that’s true. Public call boxes are sometimes used as conveniences, although less so since the redesign.

The new boxes - as those who have known the old ones still call them - lack character, but are clearly far cheaper to maintain. There is one at the end of our street. In more than a decade I have never seen anyone in it, let alone a queue. With mobile phones, my daughters don’t need to sneak out and make surreptitious calls. They don’t know what they are missing - their experience of communication is very, very different to ours, and not half as exciting.

Some villages have successfully fought to retain their old red phone boxes. Others have been turned into mini libraries or greenhouses, or given other imaginative uses. Some contain life-saving defibrillators. I wish our village - where my parents still live - had retained its traditional box. It lent a spot of colour and interest to the high street.

Red telephone boxes are part of my childhood. I can understand their being decommissioned, but it is sad to see so many looking shabby and redundant. For many they will always trigger memories of days filled with mischief and fun.