These much ignored pieces of rural and urban furniture finally have a website of their own.
This is not the site to visit for technical information pertaining to telegraph poles. You'll find nothing about 10KVa transformers, digital telephone networking or even so much as a single volt. This is a website celebrating the glorious everyday mundanitude of these simple silent sentinels the world over. We don't care what the wires contain either. They all carry electricity in some way be it the sparky stuff which boils your kettle, or the thinner stuff with your voice in it when you're on the phone.
Country Life and a virtuoso trumpet solo
Amongst the heavily thumbed magazines to be found in the waiting room at my rural GP surgery was always at least one copy of Country Life. This magazine, to me, represented the completely unobtainable. It featured houses the likes of which I would never afford. There were nuptial celebrations that clearly weren’t in the local working men’s club and a heady mix of horse-riding features, fine art sales and articles about Rolls Royce. Unobtainable – like that girl in the sixth form to my fourth year hormone rush.
How elevated must I feel now to find myself within it’s esteemed pages. 19th January issue. Hardly tomorrow’s chip paper. This serendipitous chain of events continued with my receiving a letter from Adrian Holmes from Barnes which is so glowing in praise and so beautifully written that I post it here verbatim:
Dear Martin –
Your book (which I saw featured in Country Life) is an absolute delight – by turns daft, erudite and laugh-out-loud funny. Thank you for the pleasure it gave me.
As a mark of my appreciation, here’s a photo I took while on holiday in Scotland in July 2005. The stretch of water in the distance is Upper Loch Torridon.
Regrettably, Google Streetview reveals the inevitable has happened – that jaunty line of beautifully weathered poles has since danced its way into oblivion.
Now in its place there’s just a drab line of freshly creosoted, boringly vertical spindles (there’s no other term), carrying one measly multicore cable.
Actually, I tell a lie: by some miracle, original pole no. 3 in the photo is still hanging on in there. Yay!
Best wishes,
Adrian Holmes
Barnes
London
I confess to a tear upon reading Adrian’s words, and then a second tear as my heart swelled with this breathtaking view from Scotland.
The full article from Country Life can be found right here. Country Living, 19th January
The GOOD, the NOT BAD & the WHAT FRESH HELL IS THIS?
TPAS staff retired the short distance to the seaside this week. Overdue R&R away from the rubble and brick dust that permeates our regular inland HQ. Newport (Trefdraeth) sits aside the mouth of the River Nevern (Afon Nyfer) in Pembrokeshire and is as charmingly gentrified as you can get in Wales. Think Kensington-on-Sea. The busily compact commercial centre is the ideal place to stock up on cinnamon candles, scented snowmen and gift-wrapped logs. And for the traditional gasp of “how much?” try ordering a pint and a small glass of house red in one of the hostelries.
Don’t get me started on the grand replacement of local populace by wealthy incomers, the high pampered dog to human ratio or the almost complete erosion of the Welsh language in the area. I said don’t get me started ! Think Cornwall and the Lake District but yn Cymraeg.
Anyway, not one to waste time not looking at telegraph poles here are my findings, pre-sorted, for your convenience into appropriate categories. Decide for yourself which is which.
Note to self: get a better camera. 
Wonky pole, not long for this world. 
Quirky but not bad. 
Dear me, no! 
WHAT FRESH HELL IS THIS? 
Newport from Mynydd Carningli
Erection
I came this ‘ ‘ close to deleting an email I received this week with the subject line as above. I used to receive many such messages. Often accompanied by words like dysfunction, failure, problems etc. All the while extolling the virtues of some wonder pills guaranteed to make my wife happy. It’s well known in this household that a long trawl around a garden centre is far more likely to lighten Mrs TPAS’ countenance than anything I could swallow. I think. I hope!
Anyway, I have the curiosity of a small, hungry cat called Brian, and I noticed that this particular email also had a photo attached. So it is by the skin of all our teeth that I present to you this delicious telegraph pole courtesy of Euros Jones.
Euros is not one to waste words and the photo came with the simple caption:
“Went through Aberangell last week and saw this pole being replaced.”
Aberangell is a village deep within the stunning gorgeousness of the Dovey hills, N.E. of Machynlleth. And just think what a coup it would have been had we also a photo of this old pole coming down and the new one going up as witnessed, alas uncaptured, by Euros. If I won the lottery I suppose I could always get them to re-enact it just for my not-at-all-obsessive benefit.
Anyway, I doff my cap firmly in Euros’ direction. He saw a pole being replaced and somehow managed to put his hands on the photo of it going up in the first place decades ago. I certainly couldn’t do that. And I don’t know many who could. Actually, I say I doff my cap, but truth is, the only headwear I ever wear is an Aberystwyth Town FC bobble hat. So next time I’m at the footy Euros, it’ll get doffed your way.
Navigation The TElegraph Pole Way
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?
An Answer On a Postcard
Readers with a functioning memory will, of course, remember this story we ran 9 years ago: answers-on-a-postcard-please. To save you clicking and looking, I asked what the hell is this little salt pot thing I saw hanging beneath a power pole in a remote valley in mid Wales.
Well thanks be to Chris Morris from Newtown who was also wondering what these are and so took a pair of binoculars to find out. Turns out, they are Fault Passage Indicators. According to Chris they are completely wireless and detect faults by analysing the phase currents and their imbalance, by analysing the electromagnetic field(s).
For the really curious out there they are made by a company called Bowdens whose registered address is Spook Hill (I write this on Halloween – you couldn’t make this up).
This from their online catalogue of hard-core nerdy gadgets. I couldn’t find an “add to basket” button otherwise I’d have bought one and turned into a mug.
Anyway, thanks Chris. I can now look to rebuild my life again after 9 years of restless, troubled nights not knowing what this thing was.
Dundalk Poles
“Being late is the sincerest form of rudeness” – Martin Evans, Founder, T.P.A.S.
You can quote me on that. I have been known to be a whole day early for appointments. I’ve been at the railway station so “in good time” that I caught the train 3 trains before the one I was meant to go on. And I’m always at the turnstiles at Park Avenue just as the yawning caretaker arrives to let the football club staff in.
This is how we ended up cruising the R173 just north of Dundalk. On our way south to catch the good ship Stena Adventurer and Mrs TPAS refused to spend four hours waiting in the car for Dublin terminal 3 check-in to open.
We were ostensibly going to look out for curlews and oyster catchers on the mudflats near Bellurgan point. I have photographed these poles before. But 3 years have passed and I did find another one further up the same road. At least one of these should be pole of the month, but I can’t choose which.
Now, we weren’t 100% sure of the way back to the ferry terminal from here. Luckily, the last pole had the answer. My life hasn’t been the same since.
Postcards from Didsbury
Sarah-Jane Coleby wrote to us:
“In honour of telegraph appreciation day I’ve gone through some old postcards. A couple have stamps and date from 1910, I’m no telegraph pole expert but I hope some of these are of interest 😊 “.
They are indeed Jane. Anything with even a hint of telegraph pole on it piques my interest, girds my loins, stirs my porridge so to speak.
They’re not great resolution so I’ll tell you that they are mostly of a place called Didsbury. Which now, in the present tense, would be called Doesbury and soon it will be called Willbury surely. Did you see what I did there? 😉 Thank you Sarah-Jane.
Russell is a Jerk
This is a tale from over there. Mike (whose surname never made it the 3,327 miles across the Atlantic) wrote to us from Seaside Heights, New Joizy wherein he is a lineman for an electric utility company. He sent us the photos you see below accompanied by the following missive:
“There once was a Lineman named Russ and a Telephone repair man called Tom. They were always playing jokes on each other, such as , if Russ saw Tom’s truck in town, he would go put dielectric grease on his door handle or his steering wheel or tool bin door or all three.
So Tommy made a sign with the stencil kit they use to make tags for the poles and that’s where this came from. I’ve been working here 20 years and I know Russ retired way before I started, so I don’t know how long that’s been here.”
This website and society leans, say, 95% towards Britishness, so over here a more relevant, accessible, phrase stenciled into a telegraph pole might be “Russell is a Knob“.
If you are at all affected by things you’ve seen or read on this page you should call “Hope & Healing” on 866-202-HELP
Telegraph Pole Miscellania
Three photos for your delectation this Telegraph Pole Appreciation Day. Picture #1 is from a recent foray into England. Ostensibly on family business but in actual fact to sample the uniquely quaffable ale that is Haymaker’s IPA at source in the village of Hook Norton, Oxfordshire. This wee DP largely lost in foliage but unmissed by this keen spotter’s eye.
Second and third are photos of photographs in a shop window display in Llandysul, Ceredigion. I know this little town well and these poles made my day and if they don’t make yours then you have no soul.
HAPPY TELEGRAPH POLE APPRECIATION DAY 🙂
Llandysul High Street 
Llandysul, Ceredigion
Telegraph Pole Appreciation Day – Sept 21st
Blimey, this soon comes around. You know what to do. Get out there and get appreciating…
Photo: (Poles on Mull, thanks John Cranston)