After doing some digging, I found that this is a Fowler 16263 ‘Talisman’ belonging to the Pickfords removal company delivering an M.G. cylinder to St. Anne’s Board Mills in Bristol in 1938.

Corgi apparently even made a toy of this event.

I used to use mine almost every day with the same set of earbuds that I’ve had for probably close to a decade at this point. Since getting a phone without a jack, I listen to music significantly less now which is quite upsetting. I’m not the type to use the speaker on the phone since I’ve always seen that as rude, and the wireless earbuds that I have are just inconvenient to use at best and not the same quality compared to the wired ones (That’s not to say that they’re poor quality but I can absolutely tell the difference on my favourite songs).

I’ve been very tempted to just go back to my old phone once the contract on my current one has ended if modern phones are going to move away from 3.5mm jacks.

It has been an excellent universal standard for decades and the arguments about it being obsolete make no sense as it isn’t being replaced by something superior, it’s just being deleted entirely and a cumbersome workaround is being sold as a positive thing. The only real argument I can see for deleting the jack is that it saves the manufacturers a couple of pennies per unit.

They made a range of translucent models that sold out in less than a minute and (surprise, surprise) seemingly all found their way on to eBay for three times the original price.