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.
