Fine t-shirt art worn by an archery friend
Overgrown phone box in St Michaels
Closing the door of overgrown phone box in St Michaels is like a bushtucker trial from I’m A Celebrity
Covered in thick foliage and buried deep into the hedgerow, this phone box in St Michaels felt like “something from I’m A Celebrity”.
Councillor Sue Ferguson, who posted the picture on social media, said closing the door of the dark, dingy kiosk felt like a challenge from the ITV show.
Councillor Sue Ferguson, who posted the picture on social media, said closing the door of the dark, dingy kiosk felt like a challenge from the ITV show.
She said:
“If you were slightly scared of insects you really wouldn’t want to be in there. It was quite horrible to go inside. It felt like one of those awful things from I’m A Celebrity – it would be one their terrible tasks to actually shut the door!”
In the popular reality show, contestants perform tricky or terrifying tasks – bushtucker trials – to win food and treats for their camp and most of the challenges involve creepy crawlies.
The kiosk next to the Fat Ox pub still works but as most people have a mobile phone now, it is rarely used.
Their production of telephone boxes ended altogether in 1985 with the advent of the KX series phones and many kiosk around the country have been broken and abandoned.
Mrs Ferguson added:
“I tweeted pictures of it to BT showing what a state it was in and they actually replied to say they would get this sorted, so well done BT for wanting to do something about it.”
Penang, Malaysia
A fabulous contribution from an Australian friend who has been travelling in Malaysia.
Penang
(photo by Natacha Dobrovolsky)
A couple more viewings
A second from ‘The Man in the High Castle’
A third from ‘Man in the High Castle’
Predestination
Box marks the spot
BT installed its 100,000th payphone at Dunsop Bridge, Lancashire in 1992 and included a plaque to explain its significance. It reads:
“You are calling from the BT payphone that marks the centre of Great Britain.”
In fact, the phone is 4.2 miles (6.8 km) from the true centre. Postmaster and shop owner Phil Woodhead said the town did not capitalise on its status.
“There is only that payphone really… we haven’t put up big signs or anything like that. If this was a bigger town with more shops, then maybe we would do something. But because we are so small, there is really no-one to push it.”
Goose tribute
Local phone box is a place to lay tribute to a much loved village goose.
Photo supplied by SWNS.
Villagers have been left devastated after a goose which had been a much loved part of their community for over a decade was shot dead.
Residents were outraged after learning their feathered friend had been killed in a “spineless” attack, shot close to his left eye with what is thought to have been an air rifle, just yards from the pond where it hatched 11 years ago.”
(Full story on the Telegraph website)
A literary telephone box
In reading ‘Island’ by Aldous Huxley I came across the paragraph below. The speaker is talking about a ‘Mutual Adoption Club’ and comparing it to Western society. On Pala (the island the title refers to) whenever the parental home becomes too unbearable the child is allowed to migrate to one of its other homes within its MAC. A MAC consists of from 15 to 25 assorted couples and everyone in the club adopts everyone else. An inclusive, voluntary family. This is one of the good ideas of the book but there are a few hoopy ones – must have been all the drugs Huxley was taking…
Things are a great deal better in your part of the world – better, but still quite bad enough. You escape the state-appointed baby-tamers; but your society condemns you to pass your childhood in an exclusive family, with only a single set of siblings and parents. They’re foisted on you by hereditary predestination. You can’t get rid of them, can’t take a holiday from them, can’t go to anyone else for a change of moral or psychological air. It’s freedom, if you like – but freedom in a telephone box.*
*Huxley, Aldous. 2005. Island. London: Vintage, p.91.
Current TV favourite
I’ve become very fond of Father Brown. He’s a follow up to Miss Marple so what’s not to love. This scene cracked me up – another fab use for a phone box. Make a phone call to a cross-dressing club and when you give the right code phrase the door in the wall behind the phone box will open and let you into the club.
Fargo 2
The second Fargo TV series (wonderful) showed us a few phone shots and one box in particular got a lot of use:
Mojave Phone Booth
I listen to a podcast called ‘99% Invisible’. It’s an American series I have been onto for a couple of years – although I only listen in spasmodically. Podcast no. 202 is title ‘Mojave Phone Booth’ . Cool.
It has led me to a movie I didn’t know about ‘Mojave Phone Booth’ (2006) and the Wikipedia page on the artefact itself – you guessed it, a phone box in the Mojave desert.
This goes a long way to proving that I am not alone in my fascination for phone boxes.
Comments Off on Mojave Phone Booth
Posted in Comment, Geography, Media
Tagged cinema, desert, USA