Not having received any reply to Tigger’s text, we ventured out into the night to search for food.

Making pizza

British readers will no doubt recognise the stripey shirt as standard wear in PizzaExpress restaurants. There is a branch near our temporary accommodation. That seemed good enough in the circumstances.

On the way back, we even found a shop open for some last-minute purchases.

Street illuminations (photo by Tigger)

Even the back streets were decorated with colourful illuminations.

Street illuminations (photo by Tigger)

Although it is a degree or so warmer here than in London, we did not feel like hanging about and so returned to the apartment.

Our temporary home is on the third floor. It is accessed by a steep, narrow staircase comprising 53 steps. Yes, 53, and there is no lift. If I lived here, that staircase would either kill me or make me healthy. All being well, I won’t be here long enough for either outcome to occur.

We have just arrived in Ramsgate where we have rented an apartment for the three days over Christmas. The apartment is pretty basic but at least the heating is working.

From the lounge window we have a view over the harbour.

Illuminated boats in Ramsgate Harbour

The boats in the harbour are decked out with Christmas lights as you can see in the above photo. Most of the lights are flashing which the photo doesn’t show.

We have brought food with us but it needs to be microwaved and – guess what? Yes! There is no microwave.

Tigger has texted the landlord to ask whether the bowls provided in the kitchen can be put in the oven. If we don’t receive a reply, we shall have to try our luck finding a restaurant still open.

We have made tea (at least there is a kettle) and when we have finished this, if the landlord hasn’t replied or the answer is negative, we shall sally forth in search of food.

These days, in the streets and cafes, on buses and trains, or sitting in the park, every second person you see is talking on a mobile phone or otherwise fiddling with one of these electronic devices.

When I was a child living in Brighton, a “telephone” was something quite different. For one thing, it was not portable because it was attached by a wire to a socket in the wall. For another, the cost of installing a handset and subscribing to the telephone service meant that only reasonably affluent people could afford to have their own telephone.

We therefore did not have a telephone at home. If the need arose to make a call, we could use the telephone at the house next-door-but-one with the kind permission of the owners. More usually, we would go to one of the local public telephone booths of which there were several not far from the house. These familiar iron and glass installations, painted bright red, were a common sight in the streets of the time but have all but disappeared today.

In those days, there were two sorts of calls, local calls and trunk calls, that is, long distance calls to other parts of the country and even abroad. Local calls, as the name implies, were calls within the local area and, throughout my time in Brighton, cost 2 old pence. Yes, you paid a fixed rate of 2d no matter how long your call lasted!

You have perhaps seen pictures of these old telephones, or even a surviving one in a museum. Below the receiver and dial was a big black metal box and beside it a shelf for telephone directories. The box had painted on it the large white letters ‘A’ and ‘B’. These labelled the two buttons which operated the payment mechanism.

To make a local call, you lifted the receiver and inserted two copper pennies in the slot on top of the box. You then dialled the number and waited for the other party to respond. On hearing the response (they could talk to you but you could not talk to them yet), you had to press button ‘A’. You would hear the pennies drop into the interior of the box and you could now speak to the other person. If no one answered your call, you could instead press button ‘B’ and this would result in your pennies tumbling down a chute into a little collecting tray.

People sometimes forgot to press ‘B’ after a failed call and we kids would sometimes do the rounds of the local phone boxes, pressing the button in case there was uncollected cash to be collected. Another trick was to roll up a ball of paper and stuff it in the chute. If someone pressed ‘B’ the money would be caught by the paper and the chances were that the person would think the return mechanism had failed and would leave without checking further. The miscreants would return later, pull out the paper and collect the harvest.

If making a local call was simplicity itself, the same was not true of phoning further afield. This was called “making a trunk call”. For this, you needed to come supplied with plenty of small change.

First you would dial 0 (later 100) and when the operator answered, ask for “trunk calls” or simply “trunks”. You would be connected to the trunk call operator who would start by asking you what number you wished to call: “What number do you require?”

The operator would tell you how much miney to put into the slot atop the black box. She (the operator was almost inevitably female) would then attempt to connect you via the network. If she succeeded, she would say “Press button ‘A’ now, caller”. Having done so, you would have three minutes in which to talk to the other party.

Electronic beeps would warn you when your call was about to end or the operator might break in and ask whether you wished to continue talking. If so, you needed to insert another payment and press button ‘A’.

How did the operator know that you had inserted the correct amount and not just any old coins? Because each coin made a characteristic ping as you put it in the slot. It must have taken practice to recognize the pings and add up the amount.

When I speak of dialling the number, I am referring to the old style rotatory dial, not to anything resembling the modern keypad that is now used on mobile phones, secured doors and a thousand and one other devices. I read somewhere that modern schoolchildren, on being presented with a rotatory dial couldn’t work out how to use it.

Old-style telephone with buttons ‘A’ and ‘B’

The dial was a metal disc, perforated around the edge with 10 holes numbered 1 to 0 and with the 0 following the 9. (See the photo above.) To dial one digit you put your finger in the hole in rotating disc that showed the digit concerned, and used it to turn rotate the disc clockwise until your finger met the stop. Then you let go of the dial which rotated back to its rest position sending a signal corresponding to the chosen digit as it did so. You would do this for as many digits as were in the phone number. Though this may seem clumsy in an age of keypads, it was really quite an ingenious solution to the otherwise difficult problem of how to communicate the required number to an unintelligent (“dumb” in modern parlance) machine. This is indicated by the fact that it was adopted worldwide.

These days, phone numbers are given as purely numeric strings. In the UK, a phone number has 11 digits which is not easy to memorize. In the days of which I speak, the telephone dial included letters as well as numbers. The letters were grouped three to a digit on the dial. (Some modern mobile phones still show these letters.) Dialling a letter, of course, was the same as dialling a number but the use of letters helped in remembering someone’s phone number. Whereas today the leading digits of the phone number indicate the area (for example, 0207 and 0208 represent areas of London), letters served the same purpose. Each exchange had a name and to make a call, you dialled the first three letters of the exchange name, followed by the numeric digits. So, for example, one London exchange was called Gulliver and to call a number in that area, you might dial something like GUL 1234.

Because it took time to connect a trunk call, not to mention an international call, you might have to spend quite a while in the telephone kiosk if you were using a public phone. Often you would exit to find a queue of impatient people, forced to wait while you dialogued with the operator and inserted heaps of coins. Sometimes, people would thump on the glass in the hope of hurrying you along. Again, it was not unknown for a call to be disconnected prematurely as a result of some fault in the system. You would then have to call up the operator, explain the problem andf start all over again, much to the joy of the people waiting…

Today’s portable phone users, chatting away to friends here there and everywere don’t know how much fun they are missing!

Today we set out to meet a couple of friends. First, though, we breakfasted at Jusaka, after which I took this photo of our favourite local building, the Angel hotel now repurposed as an office block.

Angel, Sunshine after rain

Next we caught a bus to Covent Garden, the location of this photo.

Seven Dials, Covent Garden

This crossroads is named, for obvious reasons, Seven Dials and, like much of Convent Garden, has been decorated for Christmas.

Because one of our friends is Italian and fairly new to London, Tigger thought a ramble around Clerkenwell might interest him. This is because in the 19th and 20th centuries, Clerkenwell became home to a sizeable Italian community and was popularly called “Little Italy”. Many traces of this remain, one of which is the Italianate Church of Our Most Holy Redeemer.

Church of Our Most Holy Redeemer Clerkenwell

We went along for a visit. It is lavishly decorated with plenty of figures of saints. My attention was attracted by the Nativity Scene.

Where’s the baby? (Oh, not here yet)

Atheist that I am, unused to the habits and customs of churchgoers, I at first thought that the figure of the infant Jesus had been stolen! Afterwards, I realised that no, it hadn’t been taken but, as is the custom in Catholic and High Anglican churches, it had not yet been placed in the crib and will only appear on Christmas day. While that has a certain logic to it, I suppose, in the meantime it leaves Mary, Joseph and sundry persons and animals gazing adoringly at an empty hollow in the hay.

On a table waiting…

On a table waiting…

On the other side of the church I spied these three fellows on a table, also gazing raptly at nothing in particular. Presumably, they will remain in this suspended state until January 6th when they too will be placed in the crib.

On the way out I noticed an interesting sign of the times: in the aisle stood an electronic terminal which the faithful can use to make donations by means of contactless bank card.

We also visited Saint Peter’s Italian Catholic Church which is even more Italian than the preceding one in the sense that its name board gives its name of the church (Chiesa Italiana di San Pietro) and the times of services in both English and Italian. This suggests that there is still a numerous Italian community in the area. How will this be affected by Brexit? Probably not at all.

This church has two Nativity Scenes, one outside in the porch:

St Peter’s, outside crib

and another more elaborate one inside:

St Peter’s, inside crib

And yes, in both, everyone was adoring an empty spot in the hay.

When we arrived, there was a baptismal rite in progress but the priest waved to us to say we could visit the church.

The district takes its name, Clerkenwell, from the medieval well that existed there and can still be seen though it is now inside a building. I believe it can be viewed by appointment or you can just catch a glimpse of it through a window. In medieval times, a “clerk” was a scholar or member of a religious house and the clerks of the name were possibly the members if the local Priory of the Knights Hospitallers of the Order of St John. This historic site can also be visited.