When did you last use a public phone box? Come on, spit it out – and you can’t count the time you sneaked in to pick up a card for Luscious Linda’s Lust Line. You can’t remember, can you? You want to say that you applaud the public service spirit underlining payphones – “Hey, yeah, let’s save the great British phone box!” – but it’s like local greengrocers, isn’t it? You never really use them because you’re too busy filling your supermarket trolley with prepacked sugar snaps imported from Guatemala and picked by children aged five who are paid four yoghurts a year. Just like you never use call boxes because you have a swanky mobile with a Celine Dion ringtone.

Don’t be ashamed. We’re all as bad, saying one thing and doing another. A phone box in Poynton, Cheshire, is attracting attention because it is earmarked for the chop by BT, having been used to make just one call in the past year. This is hardly surprising. Cheshire is so posh the locals get their butlers to dial the numbers on their gold-plated iPhones. The only use they’d have for phone boxes is as target practice for golf.

Anyway, I recently spent a day monitoring “Britain’s busiest phone box” in Piccadilly Gardens, Manchester. There are 21 of them actually and, yes, they’re unfathomably busy. Why? Even tramps have pay-as-you-go now, don’t they? I was gobsmacked to find that it’s a 40p minimum charge, but for that you get 20 minutes of talk time to a landline. Is this not a stupendous bargain? You can also send texts (20p) and get wifi from some call boxes and, probably, an all-body massage with extras (see Luscious Linda). So why don’t we use them more often? I’ll tell you why. 1. They’re full of germs. 2. They smell of wee. 3. There are only three types of people who regularly use phone boxes: drug dealers, the poor, and those having an affair who can’t risk the call showing up on their mobile phone bill.

So, logically, those campaigning to save unprofitable phone boxes from demolition should focus on increasing the numbers of exactly these sorts of people. It shouldn’t be difficult – if more of us lash all our money on crack we’ll boost groups one and two and then, by default, group three because we’ll soon have to start sleeping with our crack dealers to get our next fix. Simple!

Or we could wake up and realise that if we don’t start using call boxes again we’ll sleepwalk into a world where there is no back-up for those occasions when we lock our handbag in the car or stagger drunk out of a nightclub, accidentally give our mobile to a pigeon then find there’s no way of ringing home to get a lift.

Use them or lose them, people. And in the meantime, thank a drug dealer that they still exist.

bargainhunter@thetimes.co.uk

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