PETER HITCHENS: The relics of my past found in a drawer while clearing out the loft which stirred so many vivid memories…

Strange, alien devices, jumbled and gray, stared palely at me from the back of a drawer. As often happens when someone tries to vacate the attic, I had to stop and think.

A half-exciting, half-terrifying memory came to mind. These devices were once my lifeline and hope.

During my many years in the newspaper business, I lived in fear of discovering the greatest story of my life, only to find out that I could not find a phone call to send it to London. This was very possible, especially in some places I went to in a hurry.

Once the pinnacle of cutting-edge technology, several of these relics looked as if they could be used to connect a Soviet spacecraft with an American spacecraft. This wasn’t that far from the truth.

What I found was a bunch of equipment that was once the most advanced equipment in the world. These twisting wires, with their peculiar slots and knots, were extremely important. I had spent a small fortune sourcing these from unknown suppliers.

These were now ‘technogarbage’; Maybe it was useful to Wallace and Gromit or a large nesting bird, but not to me.

Armed with them, I can theoretically deliver my words from almost anywhere in the world. These were adapters that allowed me to connect my computer to the phone network anywhere from Siberia to Caracas.

For several years of my life, especially in the former Soviet Union, I was a fairly successful telephone engineer (only two of those many complicated cables actually mattered) and was able to merrily connect my cute red British telephone to the frayed, clunky bugged Soviet telecom network, not to mention my once exciting fax and answering machine.

Peter Hitchens writes that a few of these remnants, once state-of-the-art, look as if they could be useful for connecting a Soviet spacecraft with an American spacecraft.

Anywhere in the Evil Empire, for a few kopecks (Soviet coins whose real value was too small to be converted into Sterling even then), I could listen to messages left on my machine in Moscow by pressing a special device into the mouthpiece and emitting a unique signal.

I was especially pleased when I once did this from the remote reaches of Kazakhstan.

How the KGB (always listening) must be jealous of my advanced things.

I was also able to do something called ‘Packet Switching’, where a small laptop could connect me to the mainframe of my then newspaper in London via copper-wire telephone lines from the days of Stalin. I was sending text messages before they were invented.

But just a few years ago, I was lugging a much cruder device, known as the Tandy, from revolution to revolution in Eastern Europe.

This did not require any socket outlet, but would cause strange hissing and scratching signals to gush out towards London through rubber caps clamped hard on the telephone handset. As I recall, a machine in London was hissing and rubbing in response.

I seem to remember that it didn’t always work. One morning, around Christmas 1989, I woke up unable to move or stand thanks to the constant weight of the machine on my shoulder, which caused a crucial nerve to become pinched for several weeks (I had to be loaded sideways into the tailgate of the family car and taken to a chiropractor to be untied).

I wasn’t upset that the Tandy was becoming obsolete – which it did quickly.

How glad I was to have a full set of such slips in the days of my incessant travel to get reports from strange countries.

They are now scrap. My landline phone at home is full. The last hotel I stayed in didn’t have phones (or sockets) in the rooms (a growing trend), and when I couldn’t manage to turn off the lights (a common problem now), I had to contact reception via an app.

When I wanted to thank my bike shop for a complex repair that was done quickly, it asked me to do so via a QR code. My subsequent attempts got me blocked by the internet police. I have no idea why. I hate apps.

However, I also know that apps, QR codes, and Wi-Fi will all be forgotten things of the past once I finally learn about them. Everything we master quickly becomes obsolete, unusable and forgotten.

I once knew how to make a call from a phone booth with a broken dial. I knew how to disable a phone so my competitors couldn’t use it (but I never did it).

I knew how to turn accusations around in four languages. I knew the procedure for phoning abroad from a café in Paris, the strange token that had to be purchased, the cries of ”.don’t give up!’ the long wait, the terrible connection on the heavy black receiver from the days of Marshal Petain.

On good days, I could trick a domestic Russian phone into connecting me to London via Helsinki, rather than waiting the usual three hours to be connected by the operator.

I probably should have had something called a ‘booster’ which some Fleet Street offices have to cope with the poor volume of foreign phones. I wonder if this has something to do with the ‘rumour box’ that I took from Moscow to Riga for a friend from BBC radio who had forgotten about it. It was heavy and I got angry when he said he didn’t need it anyway. I never discovered what it was for.

I must be one of the last people alive to receive or send an actual telegram to the Urals from my neighborhood Moscow post office.

Then there was Telex, a series of flimsy perforated tapes that had to be fed into that unforgiving machine. I tried hard to avoid this.

When I arrived in Tokyo, time zones were so different that it was impossible to communicate with anyone in London without staying up until four in the morning, I sent a long article to the Reuters news agency using a secret five-letter code that I still remember.

Alongside the old cables was the long-defunct shortwave radio from which I once listened to the BBC World Service in places where truth was scarce and the BBC still knew how to deliver it.

As I lay awake on a concrete floor in Mogadishu in December 1992, not entirely sure if I knew how to get home or if I ever would, a fleeting memory came to me as I listened to him, his voice growing quieter.

When the reassuring announcer said, as he still does, ‘This is London’, London had never felt so far away.

I don’t think I’m really cut out for this foreign correspondent job.

And now all these things will go to jump.