The telephone box provides a point of refuge in an estranging world.	With all the arrogance of a latter day Marie Antoinette, a France Telecom official has announced a proposal to phase out telephone boxes in rural France. Let them use mobiles, the company suggests. Understandably a revolutionary rabble is aroused. The cabine téléphonique may be an ill-favoured structure in concrete, metal and glass, but the paysans of the French provinces still want to gossip with distant friends. Public service, they argue, should not be sacrificed for the sake of profit. Furthermore, tourists disorientated in a web of French country lanes, without map or mobile, may find themselves stranded without a telephone box. The telephone box is an irreplaceable part of social history. It provides a point of refuge in an estranging world. Far better than the mobile phone which, with brash disregard for good manners, spills personalities all over the surrounding public, phone booths provide a moment of privacy. Romances are nurtured in them. How many happily married couples turn with a gooey glance as they pass the old kiosk where, in their courting days, they scurried to make amorous calls out of earshot of others? How many errant teenagers pop quickly in to make reassuring contact with a worried mum? The payphone at the end of the café bar, the hooded booth in a rowdy concourse, the glass partition allowing wind and rubbish to whip around the ankles, do not offer the same safe-haven. In the country the telephone kiosk is at the hub of village life, a precious line of communication to the outside world. Martha, once a central character in the Radio 4 series, The Archers, knew this. She installed a carpet and flower vase in the Ambridge phonebox, ensuring that callers felt more at home.
	How many errant teenagers pop quickly in to make reassuring contact with a worried mum?	In London, the early crimson kiosks designed by Sir Gilbert Scott, with their Soanian roof-arches and Neo-Georgian windows, were not just cubicles for commerce. They were emblems of the capital. The outcry that resulted when British Telecom removed them quite rightly resulted in many being reinstated. And even in the design of its modern boxes BT has abandoned the cold angularity of an initial model, for a softer more hospitable design with seat and writing shelf. It is working to put comfort over simple function. True the kiosk can be misappropriated. It sometimes, unfortunately, serves an alternative role as a public lavatory or a gallery for call-girls' cards. Yet this is hardly a problem in rural France. France Telecom should put public service over profit and ring the changes on its decision.