BT Phone Home

The roads to Ms V's flat looked familiar to Kash and Sevan. It'd been a while since they'd been in Southwark, but perhaps they'd helped Ms V before. As they arrived at her flat, Ms V gave them a look and said

"Were you here before? Back in 2022?" - Ms V

They remembered Ms V and it was at least a year ago when they were here. No one was sure exactly when.

Entering Ms V's flat, she said that she hadn't had any help to unpack since the last GoodGym visit. Her living room was still full of boxes and bags that she felt were too much to handle by herself. Today's task was to find Ms V's old phones. These, she said, would allow her to connect to distant lands and past times.

Kash and Sevan started searching. They needed to clear items to allow them to rummage through what hid underneath. They found:

• Lots of clothes and shoes. Too many for Ms V to sort and store in one go, so some went back into bags for a future visit
• Documents. Boxes of them from years or decades ago 📜
• Cosmetics and toiletries, including 1 carrier bag containing 7 tubes of toothpaste 🪥
• Expired food and medication that Kash silently disposed of
• A chicken wishbone in a box 🐔
• Then... a candy bar mobile phone and a wired home phone! ☎️

Ms V told the pair that she kept all of her old phones and wouldn't dispose of them. Ms V was particularly protective of the wired landline. This had old photos of her family on it and she told Sevan that she'd had that phone since the 80's.

"One day BT will ask for these phones back" - Ms V

Sevan didn't ask why, but did say that it probably wouldn't work work anymore since the lines had gone digital last year. Ms V also had a perfectly good wireless landline. Ms V was determined to hold on to it. Maybe it had the power to bend time or space? Was that what BT were after?! 😨

The phones were safely stored away for now and the other tidying had made Ms V's living room much less cluttered. The sofa had been cleared and could seat 3 people now after 5 large bin bags, many empty boxes and a hoover had made their way to the communal bins.