For so long, it lay in the corner of my living room, unloved and dusty. Much of the time it was forgotten, partially hidden under the couch; an element of my house now as redundant as the salad spinner and the talcum powder given to me for Christmas in 2011.
But then, last year, my landline telephone suddenly returned to being a vital component of my life — to the eventual enragement of my partner, but, no doubt, to the delight of the BT billings department.
Because, if you want to have an affair in the 21st century, only a fool would rely on digital tools. Wives have an infuriating habit of checking the call, text and email history on mobiles for evidence of extra-marital shenanigans.
Take Amy Nuttall, the Emmerdale actress who has apparently taken back her cheating husband Andrew Buchan, with the stipulation that she should have access to his phone at all times.
She clearly isn’t clued up on the covert capabilities of the landline — or that love rats are increasingly going under the cover of analogue to hide their infidelities — be it landlines, letter-writing or, if you can find one, a phonebox.
As well as helping you avoid detection, these pre-digital methods feel thrillingly defiant and romantic in an age of fast-click emojis.
I speak from experience. I had been dating Susie for around six months when a strange, atavistic noise began shrilling from under the sofa one evening. Certain this would be either a spam call or a wrong number, I gingerly picked up the white receiver, ready to vent spleen at a call centre operative in Gateshead.
“Is that Rob?”, said a voice that immediately made my stomach lurch in a strangely uplifting way. It was an ex-girlfriend. Not just any ex-girlfriend, but the girl (who exists in every man’s life) that could categorically be classed as The Lost Girl.
This was the woman I gleefully tumbled into love with nine years previously, in an era when my landline still saw occasional use. Having both recently turned 30, we had enjoyed five lustful months together, until she lost her job and decided to move to another country to embrace a rural existence.
Smart, funny, unreliable and several hundred fathoms above me in terms of attractiveness, my brief relationship with The Lost Girl had revived for me those sickly, serotonin-high feelings of ardent love that I thought had vanished for good back in my late adolescence, evoking the heightened emotions of gasping sex on summer nights in single beds and afternoons drinking cider. I even wrote her a poem, for God’s sake.
The Lost Girl, as she explained on my landline, had returned to the UK three months ago.
I wanted to stay aloof. I wanted to tell her how content I was. I wanted to tell her that my life no longer really had room for her. But the truth was that Susie didn’t stand a chance.
Inevitably, excitement trumped guilt and we made plans for dinner. Over tapas it became clear The Lost Girl wasn’t quite as beholden to misty-eyed nostalgia as me. In fact, she was starkly forthright about the best way for those intent on modern romantic deceit to proceed.
“People think their mobile phones are like the beach, and the tide will wash away the footprints,” she told me over that dinner which, inevitably, led to the beginning of our affair. “Now I only use my mobile for work stuff.”
She had a point. I’d lost count of the amount of people I knew who had, either professionally or personally, been “caught” in acts of skulduggery thanks to an email or WhatsApp trail of messages. These implicated them squarely in the act of everything from fiddling their work expenses to lying over promised donations to a friend’s charity triathlon.
The smart move, The Lost Girl told me, if we were to continue seeing each other for more than just platonic “catch-up” drinks, was to keep our mobile phones and laptops — in fact anything other than our landlines — entirely absent from our infidelity.
Our interactions should be exclusively analogue.
This wasn’t an entirely benevolent act. The Lost Girl had, since moving back to the UK, already started dating someone who she wanted to keep in the dark.
Susie wasn’t really the type to prowl through my mobile messages while I was taking a shower. But my reliance on analogue-only tech did, I feel, give me an added layer of protection against being caught out. Nobody can trace who you’ve been calling on a landline if you press 141 before the number you wish to dial.
The fact that I worked from home and we didn’t live together made things easier, of course. But it soon became apparent that, even when Susie was at my place for an overnight stay, it wasn’t difficult to make an occasional late-night call to The Lost Girl without getting rumbled.
Why? Well, there’s something about the landline that lends itself to a sotto voce intonation. There are few things more reassuring, and redolent of being in a black-and-white film noir, than murmuring into a phone late at night.
I’d completely forgotten how quietly you can talk on a landline and still be heard. We’ve all been yelling into our mobiles, with its concomitant misfiring reception, for so long we now think the volume at which we speak is normal.
And should any call from The Lost Girl ever happen at an inconvenient time, we agreed that it would be terminated by my flatly stating: “I’m happy with my existing provider” before replacing the receiver.
It’s worth stating at this point that guilt over my affair was assuaged by clear indications from Susie that she was, to use dating parlance, “just not that into me”.
The whole escapade took me back to the mid-1990s when, as a teenager, I would stretch the white cord to snapping point, hiding in the downstairs toilet. Thus, I succeeded in avoiding my parents’ Shrek-like ears, while I navigated my way past a sequence of (inevitably) suspicious fathers reluctant to let any unknown boy speak to their daughters.
It turns out I’m not alone in turning to retro tech to conceal nefarious activities. One former colleague used a local phonebox, and even resorted to writing letters during his extra-marital affair, which, in a pleasingly dramatic flourish, were swiftly burnt by each party after reading.
“It does feel incredibly romantic to reject tech,” he told me — naturally in person rather than via email.
“I was so unhappy in my marriage, and while I was getting to know the woman I’m now with, we found the ‘back to nature’ element of running out in the rain to a phonebox and using the landline late at night added to the strength of our feelings for each other.”
For my colleague, there was a happy ending. He got a divorce and married his true love. Whereas, for me, The Lost Girl became, within two months, The Flighty Girl as she took a job in California.
Was I heartbroken all over again? Not really, second time around. At least the break-up was done over a landline, too — a crucial lesson that a secret analogue life isn’t all rainbows and warming nostalgia.
Any possible further travails as an ‘ana-rogue’ were stymied by my delayed feelings of guilt. Eventually, I confessed all to Susie. Astonishingly, she hadn’t picked up on my analogue deviousness, but she understandably dumped me.
Yet I’ve been left with the knowledge that retro-tech can, if you’re prepared to make swinging cutbacks with your morality, be rather helpful in masking your behaviour. A landline, a phonebox, or a briskly destroyed letter leave fewer traces that can come back to bite you.
So has anyone got a landline number for Andrew Buchan? I feel sure I can advise him on what to do should he be foolish or rotten enough to conduct another affair under the nose of Ms Nuttall. All I need is a phonebox and an inexhaustible supply of 20p pieces . . .