Soon only businesses and public services will have fixed lines. And not one of us will be able to phone our mother if we lose our mobile

THE PHONE book arrived this week, and what a shadow of its former stately, plump self it proved to be.

It was not all that long ago that the annual ritual of bringing in the new phone book and throwing out the old was triggered when the latest Dublin directory walloped against the front door, going on three inches thick and packed densely with phone numbers.

Landline numbers, that is – though back then, nobody referred to them as such. Even as mobile phones began to take off, people didn’t call them “landline” numbers. You had your phone number. And then perhaps, you also had a mobile number.

Once a year, when the new directories arrived, you carried in that fat directory, and the equally fat Golden Pages, and then tried to figure out how you would get rid of the old ones. In the days before the collection of recyclables, people generally heaved both old directories into the trash, adding considerable weight for the poor bin men.

Those heavy directories were a pain. They hung from a cord or a chain from payphones and were always being vandalised. When I was a student queuing up to use the row of payphones in the arts building at Trinity (a scenario that now seems positively Jurassic), it always seemed that someone had torn out the one page with the number that you needed.

The ultimate in misery for me was trying to place a reverse-charge call back to my parents in the States. You had to call a special international operator, who would, at some undetermined point in the future, maybe ring you back with a parent on the other end of the line. Whether they did or not was utterly arbitrary. If you were calling from a public payphone, you risked a riot from others queuing as you sat inside the booth looking as if you were randomly cogitating rather than using the phone.

It wasn’t much better using those shared payphones in the halls of old Dublin houses divided into bedsits. You might easily sit on a step for an hour in a freezing cold Victorian hall, reading a textbook and waiting fruitlessly for the elusive international operator to dial back. Gone are those days, and good riddance to them.

This year, the Dublin directory is positively svelte. It’s under an inch now, and 12 pages shorter than last year. A sign of the times that you can hold in your hands – if you even use it at all anymore. I don’t think I opened last year’s book more than half a dozen times, whereas once, it would have been in constant use.

One downside, of course, is that all those vital numbers generally reside on our mobile phones and no one memorizes frequently used numbers any more. Most of us could not recite a single number belonging to friends, family, even a spouse (by contrast, I still remember my landline number from childhood, and the numbers of my best friends). Nowadays, lose your mobile contacts, lose your social world.

The phonebook is getting thinner, and used more sporadically, because fewer of us have a landline any longer, of course. According to the latest EU Eurobarometer survey on the issue, which came out over the summer, more than a third of us have given up landlines entirely, well ahead of the European average.

Since 2009, seven per cent of us have moved entirely to a mobile.

Just over half of us – 57 per cent – maintain both a landline and mobile. That’s the lowest rate in Europe, and a drop of eight percentage points since 2009. The EU average is 62 per cent, unchanged since 2009.

Some 71 per cent of EU households maintain a fixed line, compared to just 62 per cent of Irish homes. The number of Irish homes with just a fixed line (and no mobile) is only eight per cent.

That we are a nation in love with mobile phones has been quite apparent ever since they arrived on the scene. And we’re still 10 percentage points ahead of the EU average in the numbers who say they use only a mobile phone and are landline-free (37 per cent versus 27 per cent). At the start of 2006, only 18 per cent of us were mobile-only.

You can see where this is going. A few years down the line, only businesses and public services will have fixed lines. And not one of us will be able to phone our mother, our spouse or our children if we lose our mobile phone, aka our portable life.

It might be the future. But it sure seems slightly ridiculous, all the same.