Last updated 11:37, Friday, 04 July 2008

It’s probably just another one of those signs of the times – the kind that makes you feel your age and want to sit down for a bit. They’re closing down telephone boxes and opening up after-school sex clinics. How the heck did that happen?She was approached for advice by three boys, aged 13, 14 and 15, who’d not yet embarked on intimate relationships but who were thinking about it and wondering about the wisdom of making the move.

Maybe you have to be 15 to understand why. Maybe you have to have no fond memories of bright red kiosks with heavy black handsets and buttons A and B, breaking their promises to give change.

Maybe you have to have a teenager’s need to talk about sex – rather than an old person’s need to talk to friend on a public phone.

We never had them in my day – sex advice centres, that is.

We had mums, dads and plenty of phone boxes of course, which tended to serve a similar purpose.

“Dad, I’ve not got much change but I missed the last bus and Jimmy’s bringing me home later.”

“No he isn’t. I’ll come and get you now pip-pip-pip-pip...”

Dads, public phones and the inescapable ET compulsion to phone home were the finest forms of safe sex all those lifetimes ago. Safe as houses. Nothing ever happened – well, nothing much and then only rarely.

Virtue was maintained, thanks to the parental Vauxhall Victor taxi service and that oft-repeated warning: “Don’t let me down!”.

Now everybody has a mobile phone, little or no inclination to confide possibility of hanky-panky to a parent and an inexplicable preference for chatting about hormone rushes and schoolgirl crushes to strangers with filing cabinets full of glossy leaflets.

Not so much as a kiss and a cuddle in a phone box, will those same youngsters have soon. Phone boxes are defunct; too costly to maintain; underused and overrated as street furniture – even in rural villages with no mobile signals and absolutely no sex clinics.

On Monday in Carlisle an after-school centre, offering advice on all matters intimate, will open for kids who have had their fill of maths, English, citizenship, scrambled egg cooking, mime appreciation and whatever other bright Ed Balls ideas litter the school timetable these days.

The youngsters will be able to talk through all those questions that have been weighing heavily on their minds; matters which, bizarrely, today’s children seem unable to discuss with parents or teachers... so they make up their own answers and send Cumbria’s teen pregnancy rates soaring.

Frankly they’d be better learning about such fundamental things at around eight or nine and learning at home, if their lessons are to be any real good to them.

Find me a teenager who knows nothing at all about sex and I’ll release my flying pig into the skies over Silloth with a balloon tied to its tail.

But while hating the idea of our children bearing their children in childhood or worse still, aborting their babies in terror, we Brits tend to go all coy about discussing sex and its pitfalls with the young – and so turn blind eyes.

This week a young girl was asked on a BBC radio show what she would do to bring down the teenage birth and abortion rate.

Having neatly silenced her infant by popping a comforting dummy in his mouth, she gave her considered solution.

“To be honest,” she said, ruefully, “I’d get rid of boys.”

A touch extreme perhaps but she was probably on the right lines – if arriving there a little late in the day.

We who can remember red phone boxes with button Bs and that distinctive aroma of too many people using too small a space too frequently, will tend to wonder why mums and dads don’t worry enough about their children to offer the kind of advice, guidance, warnings (much of them panic-stricken) we received the minute we lost interest in our toys.

Progress, we must suppose. Progress that makes everything happen faster, earlier, more automatically, in increasing isolation, with need for little or no close – if embarrassing – communication. Progress which makes all important matters somebody else’s problem, someone else’s responsibility... with lucrative potential for suing. We should wish the new Carlisle after-school clinic well.

Let’s hope it can help make a difference to the future lives of confused Cumbrian kids.

According to Irene Riddick, personal adviser at the Carlisle Centre, it already does.

We all know that feeling, boys – and it’s a good job you have Irene to turn to after school.

There are some of us who’d be tempted to advise that thinking about it is the safest way to stay, until you can find a phone box and call your dad... and the chances of that happening are growing slimmer and slimmer by the day.