I love my old telephone.

It's made of Queensland maple.

It rings like the clappers.

The neighbours on the other side of the party wall can feel the vibration when it rings.

It has that dinky shelf to stash your pen and paper.

And unlike modern landlines, when the electricity goes out my old phone keeps working just fine, although it gets a bit crackly sometimes.

Unfortunately, having a landline just isn't justifiable anymore; the costs of keeping it going would be better spent on other things (like increasing rental bills etc). So today - having avoided this day as long as I could - I disconnected Old Faithful, with a promise to him that sometime in the future, when I can have the luxury of a landline again, I will hook him up.

For the first time in my life I'm going to be dependent solely on a mobile phone, which is a very unnerving feeling.

Mobile phones just don't have the same personality or presence. :-(