Press button "B"

 Many phrases like this one, well known in the past no longer have any meaning.  It of course referred to the system of payment in public telephone boxes.  The red public phone box was on almost every street corner in the days when there were few telephones installed in private houses and before the invention of mobile phones.  In many remote areas of the Uk, they were the lifeline for a village and the only means of communication with the rest of the county.

 To use a public phone box it was necessary to make a prepayment of the necessary number of coins before dialing the number you wished to call.  If someone answered the call then it was necessary to press button "A" to make a connection.  If there was no reply then press button "B" to get the coins back.

Quite straight forward you would have thought but it did not always work that way.  The coins used for many years were pennies.  Probably the most common coin in the Uk in terms of usage so that they were also then the most worn.

. Pressing button B to get them back often resulted in two coins getting stuck together and not falling through into the receptacle cup as intended.  After a few bangs on the black box, they could come through but otherwise, the frustrated caller would go off. The next person in the box could be lucky and their coins could dislodge the stuck coins and they could make a call by pressing button "a" or their own coins would get stuck as well, adding to the blockage.

Then perhaps along came an enterprising young boy who would manage to dislodge the blockage by various means.  Most youngsters "tested" the phone box on every occasion.  Often it was just a question of pressing button "b" and retrieving the coins left behind by a caller who had been frustrated in making a call and dashed off without retrieving their money.  Otherwise, a few sharp bangs on the box would do the trick, or the judicious use of a penknife, the necessary adjunct to any schoolboy's pocket then, could release stuck coins.  Didn't work every time of course, but it was always worth a try, and if you are sauntering along with nothing else to do.......

Army sport

Until I did my national service I had never seen a game of rugby. Bear in mind that this was in the days before TV.

Whilst doing my military police training we were supposed to have Saturday afternoons free but if the camp rugby team were playing at home then we were obliged to watch. Standing on the edge of a football pitch that did not look like a football pitch and the goalposts were a strange shape as well. Not my idea of a free Saturday afternoon!

And I did not understand what was going on at all. Having played football at school and attended a few professional games I was well aware of the need to keep the ball on the pitch. These rugby players seemed to spend a lot of the time throwing the ball off the pitch and then throwing it back on again. All very strange. 

And then there were the scrums.  A very odd procedure to someone who had not seen the game previously.  The two teams seem to huddle together on the pitch and try to push their opponents until suddenly the ball is thrown into the middle and then kicked out again. Being of a logical bent even in those days I could not work out the point of that. 

After the match, both teams went into the Naafi, got drunk together, and sang bawdy songs.