Phone booths

Blu Tack

It’s an improbable association but the first thing that comes to my mind when someone says “phone booth” is “Blu Tack”. Wait, let me rephrase that: the first thing that comes to my mind is “girls”, followed by “flyers”, then “chewing gum”, and finally “Blu Tack”.

I became aware of the girls¹ and the flyers when I first visited the UK as a tourist, in 1994. The girls were advertising sexual services and the flyers — stuck on phone booth windows — were the medium through which they’d attempt to reach a clientele. These flyers were a monochrome on coloured paper affair. And, even if they’d display alluring images of assorted body parts, they were too lo-fi to hold too much my seventeen-year old attention. True that a seventeen-year old is perpetually in heat but I’m of a generation that demands its smut at least be colourised, and not just some oversize pixels on tinted paper. So I didn’t make much of the flyers then — perhaps I just marvelled at this shrewd form of guerrilla mark…