Why am I so sad about the loss of phone boxes when they are practically useless? | Emma Brockes

It's a mark of how we don't share any more, even if the idea of using a receiver someone else has just used now seems barbaric

A frequent question asked by my children - When can I get a phone?" - was broadened, recently, and with one eye on strategy, to When did you get a phone?" Ha! Massive tactical error. My children are seven, and prior to last week had no idea what that question entailed. When did I get a phone?" I said slowly, relishing the lightning rush of memory and the Ancient Mariner mode about to kick in. We didn't have phones at your age. Or at high school. Or at college." Or even, I realised with a shock, remembering a call I made from a booth in Edinburgh in 1998, in my early 20s, post-college. I didn't get a phone until I was 23 and in London." Owl-eyed, they deliberated. Gather close, children, and let me tell you about pay phones.

The red phone boxes of Britain are rightly beloved, but even in the US, where pay phones are either unlovely booths in Perspex or banked at half-height in metal, the news last week that the final New York City public pay telephone" was being removed triggered a rush of nostalgic coverage. At the corner of Seventh Avenue and 50th Street, people gathered to watch. The New York Times sent a reporter. Even 20 years ago, in the early 2000s, there were 30,000 registered pay phones in the city and if that number hasn't quite dwindled to zero - four public pay phones will remain, in perpetuity, on the Upper West Side, I guess as some kind of time capsule - clearly we've reached an ending of sorts. As the last two booths of Times Square were lifted on to a truck, the crowd took photos on the technology that killed them.