t was a tuesday when our mad neighbouring farmer, whom I shall call Mr. X, although his real name is Brian Robinson, demolished one of the telegraph poles, which carry our three telephone lines across his fields, with his modern swanky tractor with space ship type banks of lights.
British Telecom sprung into action. A man came down to inspect the damage the very next day. Then he went away. The next day, Thursday, a whole team of four men arrived with a digger and a crane and a cement mixer and a generator and a Kango and various other bits and bobs. One of the men, a chap called Sid, I had met before in the pub'. He's the sort of bloke that can enter any pub' within 25 miles and will know somebody there. He led the rest of the party over to the house for coffee and home-made biscuits and told us that unfortunately the first man had forgotten to tell anybody that the pole was actually broken, so the team went off to find a new one leaving various bits of equipment behind.
They reappeared with a new pole on the back of a lorry on Monday. They then started ferociously attacking the cement buried below ground and still held the stump of the broken pole, a task which they had finished by the end of their day (about 3pm) including forays to our house for coffee and later for tea to accompany their packed lunches. The next day they managed to sink a concrete block and hauled the new pole into place. This had to be reinforced apparently with cement, which was then done. Obviously it must have been very slow setting cement as they did not come back until Thursday.
They spent that part of Thursday that they were not lounging about our kitchen 'making good', which means filling in the hole and tamping it down, putting in a permanent stay to replace one of the temporary ones and removing the others. Then they all went leaving a brand new post in place. Wonderful! Of course the wires weren't on it yet but everything comes to those who wait. Except I suppose if you die in the meantime.
I can't account for the detailed work of the engineers as they didn't come over for tea and biscuits as the other lot had done. It took them three days and another one to actually switch it all back on. So we're now in touch with the rest of the world once again. Still, every cloud has a silver lining so they say, although I don't always believe them. In this case they did leave Mr. X's field in a dreadful mess and we managed to blag the old pole off them, which is now sawn and in our woodshed.
