Creativity: Sex and a single telephone book

WE NEVER realised there were so many really useful things you can do with out-of-date phone books. Joyce Liddington props up the ends of her bed with two of them (Yellow Pages; London and the South): 'Having your feet a little higher than your torso is very good for the circulation and varicose veins,' she says.

'Should one wish to appear taller,' advises Caroline Hull, 'one can shake the book unobtrusively down one's trouser leg, deposit it on the ground and stand on it.' More obtrusively, she also suggests 'set fire to it and send smoke signals instead of telephoning'. But can you send smoke signals to an out-of-date phone number?

Otto Black suggests leaving it by the phone to provide a ready excuse for not phoning friends you don't like much. 'Hang it on a hook in the toilet' is another of his suggestions. 'If you are the sort of person who has a phone next to the lavatory, you will find this both useful and profoundly witty.'

Most practical of all, however, he gives instructions on how to transform your phone book into a beautiful, fairly realistic and politically correct Christmas tree. Impractically, however, we omit the details.

'The answer to me is obvious,' writes Tom Gaunt. 'They should be used to build a defensive wall between the 071 and 081 numbers and use the remainder to make papier mache red telephone boxes.'

Oddly enough Paul and Steph (sorry about the confusion last week, we did not realise that Stephanpaul was your surname) suggest making papier mache phones ('cheaper, quieter and less intrusive') from old directories; or loft insulation; or piled as motorway cones; or kept in TV studios to make emergency bar charts should the computers crash. 'Simplest,' they say, 'is to fix your phone too high on the wall. Then you stand on the directories to reach it.'

'When I was at my all girls grammar school in the (supposedly permissive) late 1960s,' writes Deborah Kelly, 'our sole sex education was provided by the elderly wife of one of the governors, who came in once a year to talk to us about 'relationships'. (Patience, readers; we're coming to the exciting bit about telephone directories.) The most enduring piece of advice she gave us was that if we were ever dating a boy and he asked us to sit on his knee, we should put a telephone directory on his knee first and sit on that. She never specified whether the directory should be current, but I am sure that an out-of-date one was intended, in case it somehow became damaged in the process.'

Mrs Kelly concludes by suggesting that the out-of-date telephone directory used in this manner could solve the problem of single parents and rescue the morals of the nation.

Tony Kelly (no relation, as far as we know), uses his to unblock the U-bend of the lavatory which he used to thump with Stevenson's Book of Quotations, though he now finds phone books better designed for the purpose.

M Underwood has come up with a variety of educational uses: 'As a reading scheme in underfunded infant schools,' he suggests. 'Parents will enjoy boasting about their offspring being up to the Joneses already.' Or competitions to see who can memorise a whole column of entries first, or tearing pages into small scraps as jigsaws.

Stuart Cockerill tells us that his wife has a friend who is only five feet tall and cannot reach the urinals in many pubs. He doesn't mention what this has to do with telephone directories, but we think we can see the connection.

'If one lives near the top of a tower block,' writes Christine Cockerill (a relation, as far as we know), 'out-of-date telephone books should be hidden from one's spouse. When he goes to work, place them on the floor of the elevator and await the arrival of one's vertically challenged lover.'

Next week, we shall tell you how to get rid of unwanted Christmas guests. We should like you to tell us what to do with Christmas cards after the festive season. Ideas to: Creativity, The Independent, 40 City Road, London EC1Y 2DB.