A Phone Box for One Pound: Our Village Defibrillator — Epoche B1
What happened to the phone box The red phone box on our village green stopped earning its keep years ago. Nobody had made a call from it since anyone could remember; it stood there being photographed by cyclists. BT's answer to boxes like ours is a scheme with a very English price on it: a community can adopt its kiosk for one pound. More than seven thousand have gone that way — turned into book swaps, tiny galleries and, since March, in our case, a home for a defibrillator. The parish council paid the pound last autumn. Volunteers sanded and repainted the box over two weekends, in the proper red, and the machine itself was bought with a winter of coffee mornings. It sits in a bright yellow cabinet with a keypad lock, where the phone used to be. Last Tuesday the village hall ran a first-aid evening so that the thing would be more than decoration, and the trainer spent most of it removing excuses. You do not need training to use a defibrillator: once opened, it speaks, tells you where to place the pads, and will not deliver a shock unless it detects the rhythm that needs one. You do not need to know the cabinet's code in advance: the machine is on the national defibrillator register, so when you ring 999, the call handler sees the nearest one on the map and reads you its code. You do not even need to know the box exists — the ambulance service will send you to it. A cardiac arrest is a race measured in minutes. What stays with me is how little the winning entry cost: a dying phone box, one pound, cake money, and a register that tells the emergency number where the machine is waiting. References Sharma, A., Madaan, V., & Petty, F. (2006). Exercise for mental health. Primary Care Companion to The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 8(2), 106.