Is a mobile phone a need or a want?

It is becoming more apparent with every passing week as to just how different life is for kids these days. The other day, teaching ‘needs and wants’ after explaining that food, water, and shelter were needs, I posed a question: Is a phone a need or a want? As with previous years I was in the minority of one as the teenagers firmly disagreed with my summation that you don’t need a mobile phone to survive. They asked me what I did when I was their age, and I recounted the process: You'd arrange the weekend meet up on the Tuesday (3pm Saturday in Hastings town centre) and then you’d be there.

What if one of you was late? Would you call each other? They would ask. ‘No.’ we couldn’t. we would call one of the mums on a landline.’ ‘What’s a landline?’ they would ask…and on it went until they beat me into submission, and I gritted my teeth and agreed with them, just so we could move onto something a little different.

It seemed so much simpler then, I recounted to a student who stayed behind after class. We would queue outside a phone box and put 10p in and make a call. Further enquiries came as to what you’d do if you didn’t have 10p (we always did…kept in our shoe in case of robbery) or if not, you’d break the cardinal rule and reverse the charges.

The home phone took 20 minutes to call out as inevitably you’d get a number wrong on the rotary and have to start again as father watched eagerly as you inserted a button into the money jar by the phone on the faux marble elephant side table and hope he wouldn’t notice the different ‘dink’ sound the button made. Everything was bought with cash, you’d settle disputes with a street brawl with no sign of a knife and bikes, and large lumpy heavy things such as BMX mag burners would last for years without the slightest sign of a puncture or drop of oil.

Turning the TV over meant leaning over the back of the telly and switching the Rediffusion switch to A, B, C or D (after channel 4 went live) and I remember neighbours coming in to fawn over our first remote control which was wired (and hence not remote) and traipsed across the living room floor as we pressed with all our might to make the bloody thing work.

Holidays weren’t all inclusive packages to Sharm El-Sheik, but us loading up a Honda Civic or Ford Cortina and driving to Spain (twice) and Italy. As glamorous as that sounds, there was no air con or tech to amuse us in the back as father, sitting in front of me, eat some ‘foreign muck’ and spent three days from Calais to Alicante a few inches in front of me as he flatulated to the point of retching a million times through cheap padded seat fabric.

I remember the low point of that holiday. Dad took a sleep on the hard shoulder of a busy main road as we sat sweltering in a stinking car and I suddenly realised I had caught ‘the diarrhoea’ yet had run out of clean underwear. Believe me, there is nothing more humiliating for a seven-year-old than undressing from the waist down and having to wear a pair of your dad's used trolleys as Frenchmen beep and shout abuse through a fog of Gauloises Blonde smoke as they smash the Citroen 2cv into fourth gear.

Still, at least we didn’t have seatbelts or health and safety to contend with as we bashed our pram wheeled, wooden block braked go cart into a neighbours wall and kept Elastoplast in business through the late 70’s and 80’s and, well, it’s a surprise any of us made it this far, isn’t it?

So, is the phone a need or a want? Taking what we came from, it is still a want, although later on this afternoon it will become a need as I have to call the chiropractor to help fix the bad back which became an issue as a teen as I lifted a heavy dustbin for £1.50 an hour at my part-time job in a fish and chip shop in Winchelsea beach where, for compensation, I was given a 20-minute sit down, a bag of chips and a can of coke before being told to ‘crack on’….

• Brett Ellis is a teacher