N&NB Newsletter, January 2023

Norwich & Norfolk branch of The Telegraph Pole Appreciation Society have been quiet for some considerable time. Our fear was that they had diverted their appreciative energy towards canine waste repositories (doggy-poo bins); which abound over on the east coast. A letter from Doreen Bracegirdle (Mrs), Branch chair set our hearts at rest. Their newsletter is reproduced below:

Calendars and Crimble

Christmas is coming, the geese are getting worried and turkeys everywhere are wondering “What does January mean?” As advertising copy-writing this opening paragraph seems to be floundering just two sentences in. How to rescue it? I know, here’s the 2023 Telegraph Pole Appreciator’s calendar – yours’ from this very website for a mere £9.99 + postage. I’ve also now included the correct photo for January. The one on the product page is for another month. Can’t remember which one and they’re not back from the printers yet for me to look. I could look at the artwork I suppose, but I’m busy right now. In any case, I don’t want to spoil the surprise.

We have been promised these by 11th November and will be sending them out straight away we when get them.

And as it’s the season for sending cards. Or someone might have a birthday around this time, or indeed a wedding anniversary or even a valentine’s day. Why not cover all bases with one of our unique Generic-Card-o-Grams. £2.50 + postage. <Get one here>. Available also in pack of 5 for £10. They come with envelopes. We can send some on your behalf if you like. Just tell us who, what and where to.

New Zealand P.O. Marital Aids

Low productivity levels among telegraph pole linesmen was causing serious concern among New Zealand P.O. bosses as the 1960s came to a close. Research led them to believe this was because of unhappy home lives and if they could somehow spice up marital harmony then this trend could be reversed.

A short-lived experiment ensued in which 120 pairs of No. 1 S&M kits were handed to linesmen across three districts: Rotorua, Auckland and Christchurch. They failed however to provide explicit instructions as to their intended use and the baffled pole engineers took them home to humour their bosses.

However by the end of the six month trial period productivity had actually increased in these key areas. Dramatically so in the case of Rotorua. It turns out that the enterprising linesmen had discovered that these fierce looking devices could be attached to their legs and thus enabled them to climb poles way quicker than they ever could using a ladder. Whilst the love lives of the workers hadn’t changed, their speed up a telegraph pole had accelerated four-fold.

Embarrassed bosses back-tracked and reported that this had been their intention all along and that “leg irons” should thenceforth be issued as standard to the workforce.

The set you see below was bought by Judy Pittman at a car-swap meet in Nelson, S. Island. She was delighted to learn the history of them from me but intimated she would be keen to sell them to any of our readers were interested in adding these fascinating love-aids to their paraphernalia collections. She would be happy to post to the UK but reports that postage would cost £36. If anybody is interested, do drop me a line to martin@telegraphpoleappreciationsociety.org and I will pass on your details.

Mr. November

My career has now pinnacled and there’s little left for me to achieve in life. I’ve made it. Spangled celebrity invitations must surely follow. I think I’ll do the “Get me out of here” thing first – it’s only up the road.

I came perilously close to serious heights when The Sun did a piece about our esteemed society for a recent Saturday edition. Embarrassed by the terrible photo though and corny write-up I never broadcast this further than the foot of our stairs. And buying up all copies nationwide proved a larger task than ever I imagined.

BBC Somerset followed. That was nice, I suppose – they got it, at least, and didn’t try to score any cheap points. But then Talk Radio came on for an interview – and I found myself little more than the punctuation between the presenter’s portentous pontifications. I felt somewhat violated afterwards. So when Channel 4 came knocking for a daytime chat show, I had to decline.

I’ve seen the documentaries: Diego Maradonna never had a moment to himself and Princess Diana even had a scuba paparazzi around the U bend in her toilet. I don’t want any of that thank you very much. And neither does Mrs TPAS.

So, it’s rather fortuitous that presently we’re all forced to hide our faces behind masks enabling me to hang on to my utter Z list nonentification once the new year’s Dull Men’s Club Calendar hits the shops. For you see, dear reader, I and, more specifically, T.P.A.S. are the face of November 2021. Do you know who I am?

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dull-Mens-Club-calendar-2021/dp/0578809281

P.S. I’ve deliberately blurred the text in the hope it’ll encourage you to buy one to see what it says about me and the other eleven fascinatingly dull people on there. Plus you can use it to check if it’s still Sunday or not.

Pole of the Month – August 2020

Venerable and esteemed Honorary Technical Adviser*1 to our most sage of societies, Sir Keith S**** has a penchant for telegraph pole butts. This, a result of his entire adult career spent touring the vast vertical forests of the Baltic states and Soviet east Europe inspecting and selecting swathes of trees for a future role as British telegraph poles. Once cut down, they would have their base (butt) stamped with his initials (K.S) and stacked awaiting shipment. To this day, Sir Keith, spends his retirement days wandering the fields and byways of Cheshire and Greater Manchester searching for just one example of his initials on a butt somewhere. Meanwhile, he found this amazing 32ft National Telephone Co.*2 pole lying in a park in Cheadle.

“…Goodness knows how long it has lain there, I could not find any scribing on it as that area was completely rotted away.It has, near the butt, marks made with a scribe knife XXII , which would have been put on in the forest, a bit odd as this would indicate a length of 22 ft. But the butt stamps indicate 32 ft.”

*1 Adviser vs Advisor. I get hung up on things like this. Ever conscious of creeping Americanisms into our everyday (the word Movie is banned in TPAS Towers and a bum is never a butt) I had to look up to see if there was a more Britishy way of spelling this. In the end though I got confused and went with Adviser.

*2 National Telephone Co. was a British telephone company from 1881 until 1911.

*3. I know, I know… Our motto is “Tall, wooden, sticky-uppy with wires coming out the top” and a pole that is lying down can hardly be tall can it? It’s long, not tall. BUT. This is Keith S**** H.T.A. T.P.A.S. who sent us this and on his new-fangled 21st century telephone and all. Who’d have thought that one day we’ll all be sending photographs through the ether via a fax machine that we keep in our pocket?

TPAS Towers Correspondence

I’ve always been of the opinion that being late is the sincerest form of rudeness. I feel something the same about answering emails. If someone takes the trouble to write then I feel this deep catholic guilt to reply with some alacrity. Sometimes, though, the tousle between good and evil within me can result in a few months passing between inbox and outbox.

Exacerbation insomuch as many correspondents to TPAS Towers seem to imagine I’m some sage old telegraph engineer with hands tarred with creosote splinters and the answer to every technical/positional problem there ever was with a telegraph pole. And I confess I’m finding it hard to raise enthusiasm to enquiries about boundary disputes, pigeon poo, and other such positional conundra. I’m loathe to make it any clearer on the website header that I’m simply an excitable enthusiast from Wales who just likes the shape of telegraph poles and that we are in no way affiliated to Openreach technical division. Oh the shame of sending out a stock reply like some House of Commons MP replying to a moaning constituent. But emails about broken phones, wires hanging down or engineers trampling your roses whilst servicing a telephone pole in your garden may now be met with this or similar reply:

Dear enquirer, Many thanks for your email. Alas, I’m probably not the best person to ask. Ultimately, you see, we are just air-heads who appreciate the finer aesthetic qualities of telegraph poles. The lines they make as they dance their way o’er an undulating landscape into perspective infinity. And fluffy stuff like that. Rules, regulations, maxima and minima, rights and wrongs are things that happen to other people I’m afraid. You can contact Openreach via an online form at www.openreach.com. They don’t seem to have a phone number.

If you want to get my attention however, send me lovely pictures of telegraph poles that I can properly appreciate and share joyfully with our fellow connoisseurs. Pictures like this one from Robert Watson from the calm locked streets of Dorking RH4.

Moonlit DP in darkest Dorking, RH4 (photo: Robert Watson)

Most dropwires of the month competition…

A telegraph pole with 40 dropwires at Norden, RochdaleIs officially opened by esteemed society Honorary Technical Adviser Sir Keith S***** H.T.A. T.P.A.S.

“I noticed this pole in Norden near to my home in Rochdale. I think from experience it is probably an 11 metre medium pole, cannot be sure as unusually it has no cutting in, perhaps cutting in was abandoned. It used to be quite an art to etch a pole’s length and class clearly cleanly and quickly with a curved chisel.It drew my attention because of the unusually large number of cables connected to it, there are in fact forty! the most I have ever seen in my many years of pole observation.

I hope you will find this of interest. I had to fill my pensioner phone with boiling water so it would boil quickly and enable me to capture this image while the sky was blue.

Yours etc.”

Way too grainy a photo to be considered for pole of the month – but 40 drop wires?  Bring on the challengers.  I’ve even started a new post category for this.

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