Habits in past

I was reading “I grew up in a remote lighthouse” in the june 2015 issue when I noticed two possible mistakes: 1. “if there was bad weather, the food deliveries would be postponed and we would have to manage with whatever tins we had left”. In this sentence the author used the second conditional but the event could happen in the past so shouldn’t she have used the third conditional? Like this: “if there had been bad weather, the food deliveries would have been postponed and we would have had to manage with whatever tins we had left”. Maybe she used the second conditional to describe a possible event that could happen after you had left tins at the back of the cupboard? Then she wrote “when I had to come home for weekends I’d spend all my time on the phone to friends”. This is grammatically incomprehensible for me, both the verbal tense and the preposition “to” before “friends”. Thank you. Alessio

The language in the article is correct: the narrator isn’t speculating about what would have happened, but is describing “habits in the past.” For this we use the “would + infinitive” construction. For example, in the present “I go to the movies every week” but when I remember what I did 20 years ago I say “I would go to the movies every week.” When the narrator says “I would spend all my time on the phone” it is a “habit in the past” and not a conditional. Let’s imagine you have a brother who irritates you. You might say: “I get angry when my brother borrows my phone without asking” but many years from now, when you look back, you will say: “I would get very angry when my brother borrowed my phone without asking.”  Another example: “When our readers have a grammatical question they write to us.” One day in the future we will say “When our readers had a grammatical question they would write to us.” We hope this clears up the confusion.
As for “on the phone to friends”, in English you can say “on the phone to someone” and “on the phone with someone.”