Sorry to keep doing this. It’s just that we’re down to the last half box and I am now in the process of packing up my house to have moved before Christmas. So posting stuff out after about next week is going to get tricky. Here’s what the front of it looks like. And below that are a pair of delightful photos from Minffordd cemetary alongside the Ffestiniog Railway that didn’t make it to the calendar (a bit too dark). Did I say this already? Anyway, I’d love that everyone who wants one can get one so… Roll up, get ’em while you can right <here>.
You’ve probably seen it on the news already, but a typographical error on the February page of the new Telegraph Pole Appreciation Society calendar has caused confusion and panic buying among aficionados. The error, comprising a single missing letter caused the word “there” to appear in print as “thre”. The mistake happened in the descriptive caption of a telegraph pole near Tomduen in Scotland. While the error didn’t cause any real misinterpretation of the words it did trigger collectors of misprints of official products to buy up stock and create a temporary shortage of this now collectable calendar.
TPAS spokesperson Stoddart E. Schmelmhausen told BBC News, “The letter E key on our society laptop has been giving us trouble for a while. You have to press really hard to make the key press register. And when you’ve typed more than 200 e’s in a day already, it’s no surprise when one gets missed. We promise we’re going to make it up in any reprints and in the 2027 calendar by adding extra letter e’s at no added cost. Meanwhile, we urge all telegraph pole fans to order their copies of the 2026 calendar now as stock levels are starting to show signs of distress. In the interests of fairness, we have to set a limit of 100 calendars per customer. And that’s not up for negotiation.”
Norwich branch Chair, Willie Montgomery Stack wondered what had happened at TPAS HQ to cause such a paucity of posts recently – none since December. So he sent us their regional newsletter by way of poking us with a stick to better our ways.
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:
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.
Member #1030 John Causer wrote to let us know of: (a) His complete suffusion with pride at having obtained entry into our most august of societies, and (b) A genuine telegraph pole related anecdote which we reproduce below. It came from from “Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman” the autobiography of Richard P Feynman (1918-1988), the American Nobel laureate theoretical physicist.
Oh, Feynman – quantum electrodynamics, superfluidity, path-integral-formulation – that Richard Feynman. Yes him.
Thank you John #1030, a small red star has been placed next to your name in the TPAS register of members, which I keep in a little box in the third drawer down in my desk. Keep up the good work.
PS. John also added: “The first sentence needs some parsing. Read as ‘I entered MIT and was accepted for the Pi Lambda Delta fraternity, which had various initiation tests’ “. What?
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?
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.
Pop into the stores department at an Openreach depot down there in Somerset (precise location redacted), ask for Andy the storeman and give him the coded phrase “I’d like something for the weekend please”. Said storeman might then reach under his counter and pull out a pile of well thumbed glossy magazines. And if you’re especially lucky, like regular correspondent and top TPAS agent #0469 John Brunsden, one of those greasy mags – slipped your way – might just be a copy of The Post Office Electrical Engineers Journal from January 1939.
Using a camera cunningly concealed in his mobile phone, agent #0469 hastily snapped off a few of the pages and emailed them to us. I present you now delectable, collectible selection of eclectic photos from this amazing tome. It was with particular mirth that agent #0469 and storeman Andy pored over the man with trilby up pole on p5. Rightly so. Thank you John & Andy
Openreach (used to be called BT) works allocator Steve Sheppard - aka Shep*1 - is a collector of various vintage GPO paraphernalia and dug this old booklet out of his garage in Shepton Mallet to show the overhead/poling guys how it was in the good old days - when penny arrows really were a penny, when you could have a night out for under a shilling and when you could drive home with eight pints inside you (and when you could get killed by someone driving home with eight pints inside them).
Anyway, this is gold dust to we telegraph pole anoraks and also to railway and diorama modellers - who are always asking me for dimensions of such things (I always send them the numbers I find on the labels in my wife's underwear drawer). We are incredibly grateful to Shep and may his work allocation*2 always be fruitful. Thanks Shep, these are fabulous. Enjoy.
*1He's known as Shep not, as you might think, because of his surname, or because he's from Shep-ton Mallet, but rather because of his erstwhile obsession with John Noakes' dog.
*2 Whatever the hell that is!
Well, I’ve been banging on about this for years. Fact or fiction, that telegraph poles are aligned to have their insulators face towards London. There was evening a major film with Stoddart E. Schmelhausen in the title role of The Pole Liner you may recall. But really, always, without some real documentary evidence.
Until NOW that is. Thanks to the magic that is telegraph pole enthusiast Rick Howell. He tells us he was reading The Light Car Manual – published in 1914 when he came upon the nugget you see below. We have feebly covered the topic on here before <here> and <here> and also within the weighty, sage tome Telegraph Pole Appreciation for Beginners which we absolutely insist you buy <here> because it is only £5.99 after all, and if you root around on this website you’ll find a further 10% discount code called IAMSKINT to use at the checkout. Thanks Rick for this epic find.
I often wonder if many Polish people end up on here. Or those with an interest in Polish folk – especially those connected with the history of the telegraph as a means of communication, perhaps.
My wife says I wonder too much. In an effort to dissuade me from too much wondering my son bought me this rather excellent, long-lost book for my birthday…
“Maths and the Telegraph Pole” tells the story of the hard sums that people who put up telegraph poles have to do, in their heads, all the time holding on to lengths of wire. Things such as vectors, triangles, newtons, pythagoras, square roots and more vectors – bigger ones. Here for example is a really hard telegraph pole sum I found on page 40.
I’m afraid I failed my Bachelors degree at Telegraph Pole College and so all of this looks decidedly Egyptian to me. Or possibly even Polish!
“Maths and the Telegraph Pole” tells the story of the hard sums that people who put up telegraph poles have to do, in their heads, all the time holding on to lengths of wire. Things such as vectors, triangles, newtons, pythagoras, square roots and more vectors – bigger ones. Here for example is a really hard telegraph pole sum I found on page 40.