We visited Tilbury Fort this afternoon, located across from Gravesend on the other side of the Thames. It’s described as one of the finest surviving 17th century forts in England. There is a small museum display in the Officers’ barracks which includes a phone set from WWII (I think)…
I visited Manchester yesterday. Also a photo of street art that recently? appeared in Manchester, in the Northern Quarter. I think it was titled ‘Wonder woman’:
Just saw ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’. Fabulous movie by one of my favourite directors. I really do love Wes Anderson’s way of looking at the world. Anyway there is a lovely shot of a telephone box on stilts, pained with black and yellow zig-zags, in the middle of a snow covered field.
I am currently reading Morrissey’s ‘Autobiogrpahy’ and enjoying it. He has a very descriptive, evocative prose style. p. 179 says…”The realities of each northern day at the turn of the 1980s played out against a hardened backdrop in late repentance, because the north is a separate country – one of wild night landscapes of affectionate affliction. There are no known technological links apart from the telephone box on the corner, and this can always be relied upon to be out of order.”
Spoiler alert if you have seen ‘Stoker’. (The second shot stars the great Australian actress Jackie Weaver.)
Here are some oldies that hadn’t made it onto the site yet. (Suzette stars in Budapest and it’s me in the middle box in Krakow.)
Hungary, Budapest (1997?)
Poland, Krakow (1997?)
Slovenia, Ljubljana
Slovenia, Stanjel
We visited Normandy in November last year and here are some of the phones we came across…
Bayeux
Falaise
Mont St Michel
St Malo
Normandy bus stop
Today we visited a nuclear bunker in Essex –Secret Nuclear Bunker. I emailed the owners and they kindly let us bring our dog Couscous with us. Very interesting stuff. Although the bunker was decommissioned in the early 1990s the feel is more 1970s or earlier – the digital equipment was removed at the end and most of what is on show is telephonic systems etc of an earlier time. Here is one of the switchboards, there were a number of them in the bunker.
Coming out of the phone booth: phone box references in modern subculture
There is an article in the latest ‘Fortean Times’ (Krulos, T. 2014. Heroes in the night. In: Fortean Times, Vol. 314 May 2014, pp.28-35) which discusses the modern phenomenon of Real Life Superheroes (people who dress in the style of a superhero and roam the streets looking to fight crime). What amused me was the coining of the term ‘coming out of the phone booth’ – used to refer to the time when you reveal your lifestyle to your friends and family.
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