I was out walking the other day and looking up, usually, I’m looking down to see what my dog is up to, I came across this piece of GPO ceramic history.

When I was young, the sight of this technology attached to a property’s fascia was an indication that the family was pretty comfortably off, for they could afford a telephone.

In those days after waiting months to have a phone line, you’d share it with a neighbour. Regularly when lifting the receiver you could hear a conversation by your ‘shared’ line user. Etiquette required you to immediately replace the handset on the receiver and not listen in.

Now wherever I go around this little outpost of north-east London men are up telegraph poles (why on earth do we call a tree trunk supporting telephone lines – a telegraph pole?) attaching wires and black boxes. It all looks very efficient, and BT has even subcontracted all this climbing malarkey.

Now to press this brave new world of telephony upon us we’re getting emails warning us oldies much of our 1960s technology won’t work, while ambitious young men knock on our doors in an attempt to lure us away from our current provider with deals ‘we can’t ignore’, and our daily paper forecasts calamity awaits our future ability to call for help should we need help.

But hang on a moment, haven’t we been here before? If memory serves, around the turn of the century all our pavements were dug up to lay conduit in anticipation for cable TV and the Internet. But here it is, the telegraph method of communicating is still being used for 21st-century communications, and the wooden pole is even named after a Victorian invention.

Couldn’t the owners of the plastic pipes under our pavements just lease the tube to whoever has a contract to supply a property, just as our electricity and gas are delivered by the company of our choice, and just remove those overhead cables? With climate change and the increased winds predicted BT might be forced to take the subterranean path.