[HLIT/FLICKR_CC BY 2.0]

T­HE­ house I grew up in had a long, black beamed hall filled with dark bookshelves. Six glossy black doors led off to the rooms. Two heavily embroidered chairs sat either side of a heavy table. Placed on top was a telephone.

The telephone was black. For it to ring was rare. For calls to be made from it even rarer, and those had to be brief and after six in the evening when the rates fell. The phone was there for practical purposes only, such as imparting essential information or making plans. Anything else was both socially frivolous and an unnecessary expense.

When I was a teenager, this piece of hitherto adult paraphernalia became an obsessional focal point of my life.

In the evenings after school, I was desperate to call my friends and continue the musings begun at the back of class and cut short by a detention. My parents softened their attitude to phone usage but, as far as I was concerned, insufficiently.

From their perspective, I was always on it, while from mine, no sooner had I started a conversation than I was being told to end it.

Teenage years are defined by the feeling that everyone except you seems to be allowed do the things you can’t. I was certain everybody else could use phones freely. It was intensely annoying when, mid-call, one of the six glossy black doors opened and my mother appeared.

On some occasions, she would mouth at me to “get off the phone”. But on others, would say the words loudly enough for the person on the other end to hear, sending me into paroxysms of embarrassment.

My father had a penchant for dismissing whole sections of the population, and so it was he who brought more existential objections to the situation. Those who whiled away time chatting on the phone were either “idlers” or the “simple-minded”. I sighed in exasperation.

Yet, I knew things could be different. At my friend Julia’s house, I was privy to a life of which I could only dream.

Julia’s mother sat on a high stool in the kitchen and reached for their fashionable cream phone that, in the new, modern way, was attached to the wall.

In the manner of Sybil Fawlty, her conversation consisted of three tantalising words repeated over and again in response to whatever was being said down the line: “Ooh, I know.”

Years later, when I moved to London, I lived with a wheeler-dealer, second-hand Jag dealer who lived at the top of Hampstead.

Dashing and glamourous, he came home one evening cradling an early mobile phone. About a foot long, it had antennae coming out of the top like wire whiskers. Jeremy could in theory now call his potential buyers whenever and from wherever he happened to be.

In practice, because of the limited coverage, large parts of NW3 and 1 were excluded.

I declared it a waste of money. And having partly metamorphosed into my father’s child, asked what sort of person wanted to talk on the phone in the daytime anyway? It would “never catch on”.

As more years passed, I grew right away from wanting to spend much time on a phone. Speaking to a disembodied voice is now something done only for practical purposes.

But at the theatre last week, I was reminded of the old teenage me who hankered after the phone on the hall table.

My seat looked down on the silhouetted heads and shoulders of the stalls. As an actor began a soliloquy, a light caught my eye.

A man in Row E was scrolling a social media site. After a few minutes he put it away.

But then he took it out again. Not long afterwards, on the other side of the stalls, a second phone lit up.

Now a woman was also on social media. The knowledge neither could see me didn’t stop me glaring into the darkness. Surely a member of the now not so silhouetted audience would complain? But, as if coming to mock me, another two phones flashed.

In the apparent absence of either ushers or audience protest, I pictured my mother.

If only she had been there to step through not the glossy black door of old, but the auditorium.

Come back in glory to tell the offenders, in her no-nonsense, cut-glass accent, what she once told the teenage me.

Yet possibly the desire to be connected has always been relentless and obsessional. As children we threaded string through holes in the bottom of cans, disappeared into separate rooms, and spoke into the cavernous metal. They failed to be the walkie-talkies Blue Peter had promised and so we instead shouted from the rooms. Perhaps we should count our blessings this method of communication never caught on at the theatre.