Phone home...
MY phone rang at 3.40 am. It was still more Friday night than Saturday morning.
Me and the good lady were fast asleep - when the low menacing buzz of a phone on silent vibrate trashed the bizarre dream I was having about travelling down the Tyne in a 1960s vintage Hillman Imp along with the Bassist from Kajagoogoo and some really canny North Korean border guards.
At first my subconscious mind incorporated it into my dream and I told the Korean lads to switch their phones off as I was negotiating the tricky bend past the Baltic and didn’t want to be distracted.
That didn’t help and my conscious mind began to kick in, “Givowwer! It’s me ***** ‘phone! It’s vibrating in the middle of the night .. Who the hell...?”
Indignant anger was quickly was usurped by icy fear.
The reality of a small hours phone call summoned a familiar panic and dread which traced a knotted thread of fear all the way back to childhood.
Back in the day, folk seldom rang you in the small hours with good news.
Ominously, when the phone rang at 3.40 am, you knew it was probably bad news. Indeed I feel the physical experience of a wee hours phone was perhaps more sinister then, than it is today.
For a start, there was usually only one phone in the whole house, situated all the way downstairs in a draughty hall where it was perched smugly on its own mock-Georgian table.
When it rang, it filled the whole empty, silent house with it’s shrill, echoing and persistent clanging call.
Somebody, usually your shivering, cursing fatha, had to leave the warmth of their bed and pad downstairs.
He’d be mumbling under his breath that somebody better be in hospital or worse to get him oot of bed at that time of night.
Back then, nobody rang at that hour unless it was deathly serious. It certainly wouldn’t be like nowadays, with some daft intoxicated young un misdialling for a taxi, a pizza or to chat with a pal.
Unlike our modern millennial ‘drink and dial’ generation, even happy drunks wouldn’t usually go through the hassle of leaving the nightclub to find a freezing, weesoaked, non-vandalised phone box in mugger’s-alley, just to tell you that Gary and Julie were back together ‘cos you’d seen them snogging to Careless Whisper in the ‘smooching section’ (can’t use the more common name we used in the 1980s, it’s a family paper!)
Nowadays, the chance of a drunk dialler is obviously infinitely higher, when the smartphone is at your fingertips, (unless it’s gone down the Karsi or is being sold on by some skanky tea- leaf).
This modern combination of strong alcohol, unstable emotional states and cutting edge technology is not one that bodes well.
In contrast, the most challenging technology we faced after ‘hoying out time’ was a Metro ticket machine or maybe , in extreme situations, our parent’s Breville toaster when we had the munchies after stumbling home.
So back in my bedroom, I found myself squinting at my phone like a short-sighted sniper, trying to make sense of my nocturnal caller, who had obviously rang off as soon as picked up.
It wasn’t a number I recognised, but thank god for small mercies, it wasn’t an ‘unknown caller’ either!
They bring out my deepest paranoid fears - it could be a cold caller from Karachi, a Columbian drug lord’s hit-men or maybe it’s a North Korean cyber attack?
It turned out it was a UK mobile number; odds on it was one of the tens of thousands of teens and twenty somethings who were turning out of clubs all over the country.
They’d no doubt, at the very same moment, be cursing the taxi company, pizza joint or recent - ex they thought they’d rang for not answering.
Despairing at being awake , I went back to bed, but not before briefly toying with the idea of ringing them back and giving them a brief radge.
Or better still , hunting round Me kitchen to find that long lost Breville ...
Mike is hosting his own comedy club evening at Whickham Glebe Sports Club on Saturday February 24, featuring Radio Newcastle’s Alfie Joey along with Cal Halbert AKA ‘The Mimic Men’ as seen on Britain’s got Talent. Tickets available on door or from the venue.