MY niece is 13 and my nephew is 11, and they have both just received their first mobile phones.

They’re about 20 years younger than I was when I first got one. And they are much more capable with them than I have ever been with mine.

I use the current mobile to make phone calls, send text messages, wake up in the morning and sometimes check emails.

But it can do all sorts of other things I’ve never figured out how to do, and can’t imagine needing to either.

If I want to use it for anything else I’d probably have to ask my niece and nephew how.

I wasn’t even sure whether my mobile was a “smartphone”. When asked, I said: “Well, it’s quite a smart-looking thing.” I didn’t really know what it meant.

The words and phrases we use for various objects can indicate our generation. Just as my grandparents talked about the “wireless” as opposed to the radio, so I’m liable to call a mobile phone a “mobile” – whereas, as I noticed, my niece and nephews call them their “phone”.

It’s not as if they’re unaware of landline phones. They have always used the one in my brother’s house to phone me, thanking me for birthday presents and the like.

But to them and many other youngsters, a phone will become something you carry in your pocket more often than something that sits on a table in the hallway.

If you’re of the generation for whom “phone” means mobile phone, then the phone box is also going to be an unfamiliar concept. Indeed I imagine if I mention “phone box” to my niece or nephew they may think first of the cardboard boxes their phones came in.

For the red boxes containing public payphones have been vanishing as quickly as mobile phones have been spreading.

Their disappearance has been rapid. In the mid-1990s there were about 100,000 working phone boxes in the country. Now there are just over 2,000.

And I wonder what my niece and nephew would make of them, if they ever find one, to see this great, grey box with fat buttons and a handset connected by a thick cable, a million miles from the flat, shiny little rectangles in their pockets.

Yet for decades they were part of the furniture. In my teens I was a regular user of them.

My parents were forever complaining about the phone bill, and if I was talking to a girl and didn’t particularly want them within earshot, I used to head for one about 15 minutes’ walk from our house with my pocket full of change.

When you pulled open the heavy door you were immediately met with a strange odour that was a mixture of cigarettes, spilt beer, urine and cleaning fluid. I was always aware it can’t have been very hygienic to hold up to your ear and mouth something that had been close to countless other ears and mouths. But when you lifted the handset and heard the low hum that showed it was still in working order, there was something reassuring about it.

When I was last home I noticed that that phone box has now gone.

It was sad, but we can’t be too sentimental about them. Times change, the world moves on. We don’t drive cars we wind up with a handle or take flights in bi-planes any more.

Of course many phone boxes have been preserved and repurposed. They often contain defibrillators. Since BT began selling them to local communities in 2008, they have become mini-libraries, art galleries and displays of plants.

But some need to be retained for their original purpose – such as those in places with poor mobile reception, such as much of rural Cumbria.

The phone box in Seathwaite is one example. It sits next to a path up Scafell and was used for a 999 call after a 13-year-old boy fell and injured his leg, and was unable to walk.

The emergency operator alerted Keswick mountain rescue team, who carried him down by stretcher. It’s a good job the phone was there.

Between May 2019 and May 2020, around 150,000 999 calls were made from phone boxes.

And then there are the calls made in other emergencies, to ChildLine or the Samaritans, or used by anyone who for whatever reason can’t or daren’t make a call from home or on a mobile.

There’s another strong reason for retaining some phone boxes that nobody seems to have mentioned.

If all they’re all removed, where will Superman get changed in future?