HACKED phones have grabbed much attention lately, yet celebrities are not the only ones to be troubled by their phones. My own phone at home has been hijacked by that bloody nodding insurance dog.

Long ago, when mobiles were not even a gleam in Apple’s eye, the family telephone occupied an almost sacred place in the home. To my grandparents’ generation, the phone was black with a central metal dial and a vaguely funereal air.

Usually it was kept in the hall, on its own table, where its loud ring would reverberate until a nervous hand detached the headset from the body of the phone, which was made of Bakelite, a vintage plastic.

People did not chat so much on the phone then as give or receive important information, or so it seemed to me as a boy.

Later, perhaps by the 1970s, phones began to change colour and lose weight, but still they were kept in the hall. The amorously struck teenager would have to close all the surrounding doors to make calls and hope no one barged through to interrupt the heated mumbling. That’s unless, as sometimes happened then, the man of the house had fitted the phone with a small lock which prevented dialling, so you had to ask for the key.

A different sort of ceremony happened at work where, as on my first newspaper, a switchboard lady would have to receive and pass on all calls. You could not make a call without going through her and that was in 1980 (hardly an age ago, except that it is).

Gradually, our use of phones became much more relaxed and we learned how to chat inconsequentially. Then mobiles came in and the world of boundless chat and endless text messaging began to take over.

The mobile has stripped the home phone of its sacred status; it has almost removed its point altogether. Anyone wishing to hack our phone will be privy to regular calls from my mother-in-law, Sunday night calls to my mother and the odd message from my squash partner.

Just occasionally an old friend will phone, or one of my brothers or my father (who likes to text too). None of this would excite Rupert Murdoch’s boys.

The reason for this telephonic meander is that our home phone has became little short of a nuisance (and, no, this is not because of those calls from my very nice mother-in-law). The other day I checked the messages and there were five. How lovely: five people wished to talk to us. Only they didn’t at all; an insurance company did. “Hello, this is Churchill Insurance…” There were five automated calls in a row, two within half an hour. What’s the matter with these people?

I emailed the Churchill press office, pointing out what a nuisance these computerised calls were. But they haven’t got back to me yet.

Other nuisance calls are from somewhere far abroad, India perhaps. These present a dilemma for the liberally inclined person. They are very annoying, head-splittingly infuriating; but is it permissible to be rude to people who are struggling to earn a living in these countries?

Such considerations do not last long: eventually, after countless calls asking for someone who does not live in our house, and has never lived in our house so far as we know, the call is ended without ceremony. Sometimes it is ended before it has begun, thanks to the tell-tale time-lag bounce of long-distance calls. Ah, it’s one of those: slam the phone down.

Then there are the silent calls. These are not, so far as one can tell, from perverts or people with menacing intent. They seem to be caused by a computerised switchboard which dials numbers at random, then ends the call. But if it really is random, how come they get our number so often?

So, in exasperated conclusion, I ask: has the home phone had its day, weighted as it is with the aural equivalent of junk mail?

 

• TALKING of general annoyances, the Chancellor, George Osborne, likes to parrot the statistic that he has cut the deficit by 25 per cent. Very impressive, although Newsnight pulled his figures apart and ended up with a reduction of two per cent.

That is rather less impressive. Is it any wonder that we grow horribly weary of super-confident politicians who never tire of reciting their own much-contested brilliance?