29 Aug 2025

Ships in the Knight

posted in: Appreciating, Art, Country poles |

For 25 years Gill Knight, artist, and this sage society have been searching for one another. 25 years of us looking for someone who gets poles like we do. And for Gill it was exactly the same. She’d slump into her sofa every night kicking off her shoes, defeated, another fruitless day’s searching for a society which truly reflected her love of all things “tall, wooden, sticky-uppy and with wires coming out of the top”.

We came close once or twice. There was that time when I was heading north up the M6 to a Dull Men’s Symposium in Preston, and Gill whizzed south from her home in Scotland and we passed with a combined terminal velocity of 140mph around junction 28 – the turn off for Clayton-le-Woods. Then there was that time in Venice. Our gondola had just turned into the Rio dei Tolentini canal when Gill’s gondolier steered her boat sharply into Rio del Malcanton just as we were about to come into view. Life’s like that sometimes. It was to be another 9 years of painstaking and abortive searches before Gill found us properly in an article online somewhere and when her heavily laden email clunked through my metaphorical letter box last week, I knew our search was over. Welcome to our sage and aged society Gill.

Below is a selection of some of Gill’s excellent paintings. Now you can see why we like them. And why Gill likes us. Have a look at her recent solo show on Robertson Fine Arts website. Or have a look at Gill’s website right here: https://www.gillknightart.co.uk/

25 Jul 2025

Eric Ravilious

posted in: Art, Country poles, Gorgeousness |

The 1930s was the great age of the motor car and touring the open road was almost mandatory for the vehicle owning classes. This idealised vision of the countryside was promoted by motoring organisations and any number of guide-books. Despite not being a driver himself, Eric found inspiration in this landscape. His paintings have a soft almost dreamlike quality and it is this undulating countryside with its endless lonely lane and line of poles that I find so endearing. Apparently, Eric only added the van at a later point having seen it in a Post Office magazine.
Captain Eric Ravilious served as a war artist but was killed at the age of 39 whilst aboard a Lockheed Hudson of RAF 269 squadron on a search and rescue mission off Iceland.
This painting, bristling with telegraph poles, lot #129, going, going, went for £242,500 at Christie’s, London in June 2014.

Meanwhile, I looked again at one of the photos in the previous post – a version of which had been used as January of our 2024 TPAS Calendar and I thought of Eric Ravilious. So I wanted to see what I could do myself. So I dug out my best gouache paints, some round and flat brushes and my favourite fine-tipped sable hair brush. I decided a 250gm heavy paper with a bit of texture to hold the paint and avoid warping would probably be best. Then I set up my easel, put on my smock and artist’s bucket hat and then got down to work….”ChatGPT please can you remake this image in the style of a Ravilious painting?”

We’ll start the bidding at £100,000. Who’ll give me £100,000? Thank you, £110,000? Yes sir, do I hear £120,000? …

Click images to enlarge…

28 Oct 2024

TPAS 2025 Calendar

posted in: Art, Merchandise, Telegraph Poles, The Telegraph Pole Appreciation Society |

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 2025 Telegraph Pole Appreciator’s calendar – yours’ from this very website for a mere £10.99 + postage. These calendars already have heirloom status guaranteed. Your kids will want yours after you’ve moved upstairs. If only to line the cat’s litter tray.

They’re not back from the printers yet, but you can order one now and we’ll get it out to you in good time. To whet your appetite, below is what March 2025 looks like. If you haven’t received yours by then you’re very patient. I’d have gone nuts long before.

March 2025 page of the new Telegraph Pole Appreciation Society calendar/

And here’s a little teaser for what might be in one of the other months…

A view of a camera and image viewer as it points at the target image of a canal bridge #39 in Shropshire.

We reserve the right to have lifted our advertising copy from a post we made 2 years ago. Nobody remembers anyway.

12 Sep 2023

Telegraph Poles & Fine Art

posted in: Appreciating, Art, dropwires, Gorgeousness |

…mix surprisingly well. Anybody who has ever read our wonderful book Telegraph Pole Appreciation for Beginners (Key Stages 1-4) will have seen just how much telegraph poles feature as a muse for artists the world over.

Debbie Richards is a real artist from Ipswich, she assures us; done the whole fine art degree thing and is a member of Ipswich Art Society. “I painted a Telegraph pole at the top of my street in Ipswich because it looked somehow amazing, especially with the cloud behind it, photos attached. I wondered if you could put it on your for sale page?“

We don’t have a “for sale” page, sorry Debbie, but I will plug it here in the vain hope that some generous benefactor will buy it off you and give it to me. Debbie hopes I like it. I love it. It would hang so well here in our oak-panelled boardroom at TPAS Towers. (alongside my Joe Simpson piece). Alas, I have fewer than two halfpennys to rub together otherwise I’d snap it up immediately.

It’s 80cm x 80cm, oil on stretched canvas, framed in wood. £450 plus p&p. Do contact this office for further details.

An oil painting of a DP in an Ipswich street
A painting of a DP telegraph pole on an easel in an artist's studio
24 Apr 2023

Messing with my mind

posted in: Art, Country poles, fabled poles, Found Poles, Gorgeousness, New Poles, Nothing to do with Telegraph Poles, Oddities |

I’ve been playing with ChatGPT lately – the world-changing artificial intelligence that we, as a society, haven’t fully worked out what to do with yet. I won’t tell you how, but it is a real boon in one of my day jobs. I won’t be telling the people I work for either. Anyway, very recently, I was introduced to ChatGPT’s elder, more artistic sister. Her name is DALL-E. We’ve become very close. Close enough that Mrs TPAS is asking me what’s going on. I think up something and DALL-E draws it for me. Just like that. Here’s a couple of pictures she did for me of Godzilla in a wedding gown (Bridezilla). Mrs TPAS already knows about this side of me by the way.

Godzilla in a wedding dress as drawn by DALL-E Artificial Intelligence
Godzilla wearing a wedding veil as drawn by DALL-E Artificial Intelligence.

So, obviously, being the supreme commander of The Telegraph Pole Appreciation Society I wanted to know how DALL-E might draw a telegraph pole. So I asked her for “a photo realistic telegraph pole with 6 arms on a lonely road in Wales”. Below is what she came up with. It really flips my mind. I can almost feel the fuggy intelligence behind it all trying to please me. The landscapes and the poles are real enough, yet completely alien at the same time. Eerie even. I love them. What’s also clear is that DALL-E, like most people, doesn’t discern between a telephone pole and a power pole. Mwynhewch! as we say on lonely roads in Wales.
(click an image to enlarge)

6 Nov 2022

Calendars and Crimble

posted in: Art, Commercial, General, Stuff for Sale, Telegraph Poles, The Telegraph Pole Appreciation Society |

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.

  • A wire bound calendar opened up on January 2023 showing a rural lane in west Wales with a line of telephone poles running off into the distance.
  • A selection of scenes from the 2023 telegraph pole appreciators calendar

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.

  • A Generic greeting card
21 Oct 2022

Soul test

posted in: Appreciating, Art, dropwires, Gorgeousness, Photos, Telegraph Poles |

You don’t need to consult a fancy shaman to find out whether you have a soul or not. No need for some over paid, under-qualified practitioner to jangle some purple space crystals over your forehead, intensely reading the chakra quanta emanating from your aura. Put your money away. Here is a much simpler, instantaneous test. If the photo below leaves you completely unmoved then you have no soul. None whatsoever. Simple as that. You should immediately apply to 55 Tufton Street, London, SW1P 3QL for a research position. If however, this photo sent in by Hazel Long from Brighouse, W. Yorkshire, causes strange stirrings you don’t quite understand then you most definitely do have a soul. There.

Regular readers may well remember back two and a half years to this post {Shot at Dawn}. Hazel must be a baker or post-person or insomniac to so regularly (twice in three years) see dawn. That’s more than I’ve managed in a lifetime.

Distribution Pole in silhouette against dawn red sky at Brighouse, Yorkshire
12 Apr 2022

Abrasion, Ursine Situpons and Reg, not from Mombassa

posted in: Art, Country poles, Gorgeousness, Literature, Nothing to do with Telegraph Poles, Submissions, Telegraph Poles |

The Bond index is used as a measure of the relative abrasivity of different rock materials. It is not this index that I have been measuring my relative roughness against this week, however. Since Tuesday last, I have been as under-the-weather as Tomasz Schafernaker’s hat. A viral type lurgy that refuses to test positive as covid – which would give me full there-there-there benefits – but instead just makes me thoroughly fed up. Yesterday I peaked at 3.6 on the Bears Arse index. For reference a score of 1.0 on this scale might cover a heavily hungover Sunday morning i.e. as rough as a bear’s arse. My score of 3.6 bears’ arses is really unwell and I think ought to involve cards, Lucozade and the children surrounding my bedside asking me to sign things. Quickly.

So it was with this glumness that I sought spiritual embrocation which, as always, led me back to my TPAS inbox. Here an email from Chris O’Doherty, aka Reg Mombassa, bristling with quirky telegraph pole related art and poetry did much to bring my roughness score back below three bears’ bottoms. Still poorly mind you.

Reg Mombassa is an Australian based artist and musician who you may better know from his band “Mental as Anything” or “Dog Trumpet“. And his pop artwork oozes out of the Ozzie cultural landscape like Warholian*1 wallpaper. Reg clearly has a thing about telegraph poles, and we have permission to reproduce the images you see here. Ditto the poem (The Telegraph Pole) that he sent in via Joel Schuberg.

You can get drawn into websites like reg-mombassa.com whether for the music, the art, the laconic wit or for the feeling of “so that’s where I know that from” and frankly, it’s what the internet was made for. This has been the only thing to break me away from my cat-videos in a long while. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Reg Mombassa:

A quirky power pole pen and ink art by Reg Mombassa.
“Tree of Man” is an etching edition is part of the The British Museum’s permanent art collection. by Reg Mombassa
Tree of Man by Reg Mombassa

The second image above entitled “Tree of Man” is an etching edition and is part of the The British Museum’s permanent art collection. Reg’s website is set up to disallow any kind of cut and paste. Clever, but to read Reg’s latest poemn (as promised above) entitled “The Telegraph Pole” you’ll have to click the title there.

*1. First time I’ve ever used the term Warholian. I hope Reg isn’t offended by the comparison. Sorry if you are Reg, but I so wanted to use the word Warholian*2.

*2 Now 3 times

15 Nov 2020

Shot at Dawn By Hazel

posted in: Appreciating, Art, dropwires, Gorgeousness, Photos, Telegraph Poles |

Our Pole-of-the-Month Select committee had already convened and adjourned having chosen the winner for November (see previous post) when the image you see below landed on our metaphorical doormat.

This is Telegraph Pole Appreciation defined in a single photograph. It was taken at sunrise by Hazel Long from Brighouse in West Yorkshire. In a world where the telegraph/telephone hadn’t ever been invented this would just be a photo of a dawn sky, grading from orange to purple, and that’s it. Just let that sink in for a minute.

Hazel had to get up very early in the day to capture this pole in its true glory. Now, dawn is a time of day I tend to avoid. Statistically, you see, it is a time when one is much more likely to get shot. Especially if, like me, you err on the side of the lily-livered and if your fight or flight instinct leans heavily towards flight.

Anyway, this gloriously simple pole stands silently sentinel over the good citizens of Brighouse. Stoically it distributes essential electromagnetically modulated signals into the nearby homes: a phone call to Barbara at No. 14, perhaps, whereby she hears that Maxine from the hairdresser’s boyfriend has buggered off with her from the White Lion; Or maybe an essential youtube educational video squeezed down the line to Derek at No. 3 showing a load of cats knocking things off shelves. Or crucially, Wendy at the end of the street just clicking the Buy Now button on this very website to purchase a copy of our wonderful tome “Telegraph Pole Appreciation for Beginners“. It’s the reason the internet was invented.

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