Rising landline telephone bills are likely to add to pressure on elderly people’s finances - Sarah Todd

However, a recent bill from British Telecom could well have called time on our house telephone. Not having a landline is something that couldn’t feel more against the grain.

There will be many readers, like yours truly, who sometimes make heavy weather of remembering what they had to eat the night before but can recall without a moment’s hesitation the three digits of their childhood telephone number.

Even those awkward teenage reminiscences of boys telephoning and getting the intended recipient’s mother or father on the end of the line are remembered fondly. “And who’s speaking please?” the young lad in question would be asked.

As an aside, when communications were attached by a cable in the hallway under the stairs it was pretty much impossible for people’s parents not to be in the loop with where their offspring were going and who with.

Nowadays, so many have absolutely and utterly no idea what their children are up to because all their arrangements are made through mobile messaging.

Anyway, back to the point. A letter arrived from BT to inform us the telephone bill will, from the end of next month, be going up by £3.28 a month. So what? The thing is, nowhere in this correspondence did it say what that will take the total payment to. Maybe it was a getting out of bed the wrong side day, but queuing for a human to answer the call was braved and the question was asked.

So, it turned out, this increase will mean paying nearly £46 a month, that’s on the way to £550 a year for a service that hardly anybody ever rings us on. Well, apart from cold callers who happen to be in the area fitting loft insulation and such like. It has definitely got the old cogs turning, fathoming whether the landline should be disconnected.

The cost of keeping it just doesn’t add up when one considers this user’s mobile phone offers unlimited calls for less than £15 a month.

There is a nostalgic reluctance to do away with it, but more than that there is an anger that the price hikes are yet another cost for the elderly who might not have mobile phones to fall back on, or others who have enough on their plates without going back through bank statements - which, of course we no longer get in the post to dissect forensically at our leisure.

Especially when it comes to direct debits; seemingly an open doorway for money to disappear unchallenged. Always something to look at one day, when we have time, in our busy lives.

To pull back from turning into The Yorkshire Post’s answer to Dame Esther Rantzen in her 1970s That’s Life heyday (last week it was vehicle tax) it’s time to plough the more familiar furrow of farming.

This column has long flagged up how spot on Lake District MP and former leader of the Liberal Democrats Tim Farron is when speaking up on behalf of rural communities.

At least half a dozen people who attended the National Farmers’ Union conference last week have mentioned the pertinent points he made; showing the Tories and Labour up for their lack of connection - forgive the BT pun - with farmers.

Time and again, it seems - especially given the farce acted out in the Commons last week when speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle (who always seems a decent chap) got it wrong - British politics needs a complete overhaul. Why not simply cherry pick the best talent to lead us?

Mr Farron already has his wellies on to head up agriculture, former Tory leadership candidate Rory Stewart, who spent time in the army and the diplomatic service, could sort out defence or the Foreign Office.

Labour MP Dr Rosena Allin-Khan, who still works regular shifts at her local hospital, could get to grips with the NHS.

The future, bringing together the brightest and best, could be exciting. As the 1997 BT advertising slogan said: Why not change the way we work?