The heartless and soulless vandals at British Telecom who are determined to rob us of a vital part of our heritage in the shape of the much-loved red telephone boxes, and replace them with those brutally functional smoked glass and yellow things – Prince Charles, where are you? – have simply got to be stopped: no doubt flushed with its success in sorting out Big Bang in the City, Telecom is now all set to stamp out another big bang – the one by which the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (entirely voluntarily funded and with no support from the state) has for over 100 years summonsed the life-boat crew for an emergency – firing of a maroon; Telecom now has a fiendish idea of doing away with the bang and the flash and instead equipping the brave volunteers who sturdily crew the lifeboats with those horrid little radiopagers.
