Looks Who's Talking: Give me an old-style phone that works

IN case you think that every week I toddle down to Gomm Road and set the fingers flying on an ink-stained BFP keyboard to fill this column, I should disabuse you.

For an innocent columnist like myself, visiting the mother ship is a rather daunting experience. All those reporters in trench coats, roll-ups dangling from their mouths, chucking their hats on the desk shouting 'Hold the front page'; the bellowed imprecations floating through the peeling door that bears the legend 'Charles Mann'; the sobbing cub reporter who has just had her big expos spiked - (the one about the councillor with the concrete ball factory); the photographer banging his head against the wall trying to think of a new way to capture on celluloid the presentation of a charity cheque.

And there's the editor's suite with the rottweilers slavering outside the door and the symbolic blood-stained thesaurus hanging from a hook.

No, I prefer the comparative calm of Baker Towers. I used to fax the sacred text, but now that the 20th century has penetrated to Wycombe Marsh, my column is teleported in byte-sized chunks and then reconstituted via the wonders of e-mail. In order to accelerate this miraculous process, I succumbed to the lure of BT's new digital all-ringing, all-enhancing Home Highway. It has provided me with high-speed digital access to the internet. And I cannot deny that it has enabled me to reduce the time spent online sending and downloading information.

But - and there's always a but, isn't there?

Six days ago my phone went dead. I quickly established that all my neighbours were similarly incommunicado. They, however, were reconnected the following day, because they were good old-fashioned steam-operated analogue phone users. Your state-of-the-ark (sic) digital columnist however is still unable to make or receive any calls.

Until very recently a call to 151 about a telephone fault would connect you to a real person and a fairly local one at that. The new - wait for it - yes, computerised system you access by pressing buttons and navigating a multiple option maze. You eventually get the chance, if you really must, to speak to a human being.

That person will be many hundreds of miles away from you and will not know the area, or its engineers. It was surely not all that long ago that the engineer himself would call you back and tell you what the problem was and that he would have you properly connected before you could say GPO.

That was before digitalisation. All my neighbours have a fully working phone because they are analogue. The engineers understand them.

My nice new version is pretty tricky, apparently, and only a handful of Telecom engineers are able to do the business. I have frequently gazed in wonder at those BT wizards sitting in a hole in the ground surrounded by what seems like an explosion in a multicoloured spaghetti factory and giving every impression of knitting it with confidence. So if those geniuses can't cope with digital, can you imagine how complicated it must be? And now I have got an echo on my mobile phone, so I can hear myself as I complain bitterly to BT.

Anyway, if this is not a white stripe down the edge of the page it is because I posted these words and they got there in time.