MY LIFE IS NOW COMPLETE… Here, for your telegraphic delectation, the ultimate in home automata – a robot telegraph pole. Kindly brought into existence by London-based, Gloucestershire-born, artist Simon Handy www.simonhandy.com (and footage from Lottie O’Leary’s mobile phone).
Simon, we salute you.
Congratulations to Aaron Bailey who finally gets a credit for Pole of the Month. He was recently disqualified during a previous attempt at this prestigious award due to having submitted photos of dead poles. This time however – poor quality photograph notwithstanding – he bagged a winner:
“After a recent visit to that place where it always rains, North Wales, (Llanberis actually) I also saw that rare blue thing you have also spotted whilst looking skywards for tall, wooden sticky up things. See pictures. This pretty standard BT pole comes complete with its own self seeded Rowan tree growing out the top.
So not only is it tall, wooden and sticky up it’s also going to keep going up as it grows and gets taller! So how about that from a Telegraph Poler’s Brain!”
Nothing more to be said really. Good job it wasn’t a power line ! Many thanks to Robert Park for this Irish brilliance.
Our Honorary Technical Advisor, Sir Keith S**a* (ooh! I nearly said his name then) continues the search for a telegraph pole with his initials on. The pictures you see below are from his recent foray into darkest Dumfries & Galloway. It was here – whilst tantalising a dozen or more trout with a Gold Ribbed Hare’s Ear*1 – that Keith came across these seemingly unused poles forming a
makeshift bridge over a ditch for the facilitation of timber extraction.
“I found that one of them is a 9 metre medium pole bearing the initials of my old friend and mentor BK, Bernard Kendall. Bernard was from Birmingham and was the resident Poles Inspector at the pole yard of Calders and Grandidge at Boston Lincolnshire.
I was a young trainee and had to spend 3 months, under the instruction of the inspector, at each of the 7 pole depots around the country to complete my training, so was away from wife and son all week and home at week-ends, then an internal exam to qualify for the job. (I got the best exam marks ever recorded). Anyway, Bernard and his wife Hilda took me under their wing, looked after me like a son, fed me, counselled me, and Hilda always made me my favourite Lemon Meringue Pie. They were the most wonderful caring people I have ever met and as I write I find I have tears in my eyes, they both went to that big pole yard in the sky many years ago.”
*1 As a young man-about-town, I always had a three-pack of these about my person.
– More in hope than anything.
– And this is the closest thing to innuendo that I’ve ever been.
– The trout are now cured, smoked and in Keith’s freezer. I know you were worried about them. As was the water-bailiff.
My week started when Charlie from out of the internet blue wrote to me. I was a little confused by his punctuation but ultimately he told me that I am the best, that God blesses me, and that I should keep preaching the pole gospel. He signed it with thanks from friends in Los Angeles. Goodness me ! Alright then Charlie, thank you. I will.
There were the usual letters with questions about telegraph poles: how high, how long, how big a gap between etc. Then there was another question about a fault that had been reported to a phone line in Yorkshire – to which my answer is always “Yep, we’re right on to it”. And I would expect no less gittish an answer had I rang the Keighley Valley & Worth Steam Railway and asked them if there is a buffet trolley on the 9:30 Arriva Trains service from Aberystwyth to Shrewsbury. Maybe the distinction between appreciation society and directory inquiries is not so clear cut as I imagined.
Then, of course, there was that brilliant video John Brunsden sent us – see our facebook presence for that particular gem.
And finally, a succint email from Jamie, also from the internet, who asks “Do you accept members from Australia?” Do boys play football in the park I thought to myself. We accept anything from anyone from anywhere (at any time) is probably the best way to answer that question. Anyway, Jamie sent us the lovely power pole photo you see below together with the caption “High Wycombe, Perth, Western Australia”. Well, High Wycombe is in Buckinghamshire actually Jamie, so you got that wrong. And High Wycombe, being in British Buckinghamshire, almost never experiences blue skies like that. So someone’s got their lines crossed I think. Speaking of crossed-lines – I counted no fewer than 30 parallelograms created from those bisecting power lines. So well done me.
