As a rule, I switch off when going to bed. Nothing is ever so urgent it cannot wait a few hours till dawn. There was life before the invention of the telephone, before the tyranny of mobile cell phones. In short, for a moment, I wished the telephone had not been invented, and while my caller sobbed and spoke his grief, mine welled up slowly, looking for something that might arrest its progress. Finding none, it drifted to a poem I last read over twenty years ago. I saw now the morbid dread the late English poet, Ted Hughes, expressed so feverishly in his poem, “Do Not Pick Up the Telephone.” Even in those by-gone days of bell telephones crouched like crabs on the table or wall, fixed to a point, Hughes claimed that “Death invented the phone,” that it looked ‘like the altar of death,” with the “cosmetic breath of the gravestone.” After a long list of the evils that the telephone does, he ended on the note of strict admonition with which he began: “Do not pick up the detonator of the telephone/A flame from the last day will come lashing out of the telephone/A dead body will fall out of the telephone.” That Friday morning, there was nothing quite as apocalyptic, straight from a horror movie, but I had gone to Hughes for something on which to hang this tragedy.

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