Harrison: Until August order motilium The controls, though modified, struggled on into the 1980s. When we bought our first house in 1981, British Telecom – still nationalised, but newly split from the Post Office – told us that it would take six months to have a landline put in. Then came phone privatisation (1984). Before the end of the decade, people had new phones within days, answering machines, faxes, mobile phones. Then came the email. Nowadays, only mouldy old stay-at-homes (like us) bother with landlines. Poor countries skip the landline stage almost entirely: in Afghanistan, where hardly any houses have a conventional phone, the remotest tribesman can wield an iPhone as well as a rifle.