23rd March 2009 This was the glorious day our late founder, Sir Benjamin Spoon BEM re-incarnated himself to

attend a prestigious football event in the Blue Square Conference

of Great British Footy.

This game between Wrexham and Kidderminster Harriers was a

must-win contest for both sides and was being sponsored by this

very society.

As it happened, those bounders from the West Midlands went

home with all 3 vital points due to a 94th minute flapping of

handbags in the Wrexham defence. Much jeerification followed.

After the game, Sir Benjamin hung around the bar answering

questions from bar staff regarding how much ice to put in his

whiskey. He also took the opportunity to mingle with curious on-

lookers, getting meithered by a couple of kids as well as generally

being stared at in a mouth-agape sort of fashion. Then, as quickly

as he arrived, he disassembled himself back to his Denbighshire

graveyard where he's spent the last 150 years.

Issue #0117

These much ignored pieces of rural and urban furniture finally

have a newsletter (and a website) all of their own.

RELUCTANT REINCARNATOR RUES ROUT

This one earmarked

for a future pole-of-

the-month slot

After necking all the champagne and

smoking all the cigars, Sir Benjamin of-

fers to clean man of the match, Andrew

Crofts' shirt of all the felt-pen scrawling.

Or rather, his manservant, Huw Thayer,

will clean it.

And in his own time too.

Associate members of the Telegraph

Pole Appreciation Society gather to ap-

plaud the decision to wash said shirt.

Potential members can now join our

most august and elite society by clicking

the relevant link on the all-new website.

More of which over the page.

Favoured correspondent

and telegraph pole author,

John Penny (#0307) sent

us this picture of wood-

peckers eating a telegraph

pole outside his house.

Issue #0117

In an award ceremony which took place during

London's morning rush-hour one day last July - a

foreign student handed out a free copy of Short-

list Magazine to a colleague of mine.

And so it came to pass that The Telegraph Pole

Appreciation Society was listed 3rd in said maga-

zine's Top 10 list of things that have an apprecia-

tion society.

I wonder what they would make of our sister or-

ganisation "The Appreciation Society Appreciation

Society" - we who just adore all appreciation so-

cietys.

Glitzy Heights Achieved!

We have now filled the vacant position of Honourary Technical Manager - no further applications accepted following appointment of a gentleman by the name of Keith S*****. “I believe I am possibly the last living former Poles Inspector. I worked for the post office and inspected hundreds of thousands of poles in the raw state in forests all over the UK and in Finland. My initials KS are stamped on the base of hundreds of thousands of tele-graph poles in situ now. I also supervised the pressure creosoting of poles at various depots in the UK. There is nothing I do not know about Telegraph Poles! I also did a spell of inspecting electricity board poles for about 6 months in the early 70's so can advise on that aspect of poles also. Give me the initials from the butt of a Post Office pole and I will tell you the name of the man who in-spected it and accepted it on the Queen’s behalf - they all have one or two crowns stamped on the butt. One crown for a 'light' two crowns for a' medium' and three crowns for a 'stout 'to denote her majesty's ownership." Welcome to The Telegraph Pole Appreciation Society, Keith *Keith's real name obscured for obscure reasons of national security.

Honourary Technical Manager

The painters have taken all their empty tins away and removed the dust-sheets and so now we have an all-new joomla powered Telegraph Pole Appreciation Society website. The format allows for much easier updating. Apologies to all my corre-spondents over the last couple of years, but now I can., much later than promised) get around to posting all your stuff up online (soon). Meanwhile, my paid work front has largely followed the contours of the recession - ergo I will have more time to devote to my whimsy. Meanwhile, keep spotting out there in telegraph pole land. Martin (member#0001)

Facelift - Mission accomplished

GALLERY

Space age from

P.Jackson. #0118

31/2 & and a 4 arms

Mike S. #0220

Pleased to see you!

taken by me

More on the website

Issue #0117

LOST MASTERPIECE FOUND What an amazing week it's been here at Telegraph Pole Towers. Out of the blue I received an email from Simon Carter, the curator of an art gallery, presumably in Salisbury, Wilts. His email contained a lost telegraphic masterpiece by Tamsin Pastelle and in its original JPEG form too. He also sent us the following descriptive text: “This still-life in chalks by Tamsin Pas-telle, entitled 'Insulators 1', formed the central panel of a Triptych and is thought to have graced the South En-trance of the B.T. Chapel of Remem-brance in Salisbury, Wiltshire.”

Believed originally to have spent her formative years in the Southern Heavy Water Region of Britain, she was most active in the Reclamation Period. She discovered her passion for Tele-graphics when annotating Satellites through a pin-hole; but for years had to work undetected for fear of her public persona, as resident floral artist (watercolours) at the tiny village of Christ-mas-in-the-cotswolds, being publicly trashed. Had she not taken refuge 'neath a Rural Transformer on that day of providence... Extract taken from art notes compiled for the Tamsin Pastelle Me-morial Gallery of Street Furniture. What a find!. And it gets spookier. My late* father always claimed that he had featured in one of Ms Pastelle’s paintings. From his days up a pole as a GPO engineer. We never believed him of course – he made a lot of claims. He was supposed to have been the inspiration for horned cherub #2 in Boticelli’s Mars and Venus. We never saw this telegraph pole study of which he spoke, so we've asked Mr Carter if maybe he could help us locate it. * my father not dead yet, just rubbish at being on time.

BIPOLAR SKYSCRAPING POLE Is it a pole? or is it a pylon? These massive structures support the weight of all the electricity generated by Cefn Croes Windfarm as it crosses the lower slopes of Pumlumon (eng: Plynlimon) in mid Wales.

On this particular day (9th April) they had absolutely nothing to do as there wasn't a

single breath of wind. Not even atop the mountain itself at 2,467ft (752m). Rarely have I been so high and experienced so little wind. So, in an attempt to alleviate their intense boredom, these biploar poles, near Eisteddfa Gurig farm, took to fishing for clouds. And I was amazed to see this one catch a gorgeous little cumulus humilis as we passed underneath. It hung onto it for a short while, only to let it go back into the wild again whereafter the cloud shortly evaporated.

CERAMIC SWAG AND A

FABLED POLE Being the important person that I am (in the world of telegraph poles), I occasionally get visits from passing royalty. Such was the case last Tuesday when the contractors (and their lorry) from Car-illion dropped in for a cup of finest Welsh tea and a slice of my wife's exquisite coffee and walnut cake. Agent X* and Agent Y* were on a skiving mission before meandering their way back to their depot somewhere over the border in the badlands of Eng-land. Anyway, as well as the scrumptious bag of ceramic booty (see right) that they handed over as payment for said tea and cake, they also told me of the fabled lost pole of Bala Leisure Centre. A pole so laden with cross-spars and so bristling with an enormous double-sided bounty of ceramic insulators it must surely rank as the Jason's Golden Fleece of the telegraph pole enthusiasts world. It is said that those (enthusiasts) who gaze upon its glory are smitten for all time and spend the remainder of their days wearing fur-edged outdoor coats whilst wandering the lanes trying to re-capture the moment of that first glance. I pressed my telegraphic friends for more information but they were more insterested in Everton football club and an ashtray for their fags. These men had seen this pole and yet were somehow emotionally unperturbed. As soon as I had waved them off and watched their telegraph pole truck disappear over the horizon I dashed into the house for my ordnance survey map of Bala and also for my trusted copy of the Gazetteers field guide to the telegraph poles of Great Britain and Ireland. Oh where is Anneka Rice when you need her? Watch this space....

My wife has kept an old Cray supercomputer in the back parlour for years. We've always used it to air clothes on and dry boots. And it's a favourite place for the cat to sleep as it hums away performing its 1012 floating point opera-tions per second. Anyway, The Telegraph Pole Appreciation Society membership database has been growing quite steadily and we decided we would use the old Cray to do some statisti-cal analyis of our members. What we found was quite startling. Look at the first membership distribution graph on the left. A modest cluster of TPAS members in

Wales and Devon as we might expect. Similarly a slightly higher frequency of memberhip in the south east which also comprises London so not out of the ordinary. But the enormous spike of members per million per capita in Cambridgeshire completely flab-bered our ghast. If this were a scientific data-set then this would be more than sta-tistically significant - it might be considered definite proof of some-thing. But what? Luckily our data resolution is such that we can drill-down into the data to analyse on a town by town basis. See Fig 2.

THE PETERBOROUGH ANOMALY

The graph showed a fairly even distribution across all the towns and villages according to their respective population. But then look what happens at Peterborough. What is it about this low-lying fenland town that compels so many of its citizens to appreciate telegraph poles enough to join the only society in the whole world dedicated to appre-ciating them? Could it be the far-reaching fenland vistas allows Peterburgers unclut-tered perpectives as telegraph poles disappear off in to the distance? Who knows? But maybe we should consider holding the next Tele-graph Pole Appreciation Society Annual Conference in Peterborough.