Follow the brown signs

Yep, here it is, on the A40 just coming up to Whitney, Oxfordshire. I've been searching for one of these little puppies for ages after I began my chapter on antiques centres for the book. I like finding "rare" symbols like this one, mainly because I'm a massive brown sign spotting nerd but also because I like having real life examples of the places I write about (its why I bankrupt myself driving my car into the ground caining it all around the country to experience them). In fact a...

Read more >>

Last week I went up to York for some light horse racing action. The Mose has taken very well to working from home as a self-employed photographer and has thus managed to get herself right royally addicted to Channel 4 Racing. The superhorse of the moment and winner-of-everything Frankel was running and The Mose couldn't resist the prospect of seeing him go, yep she was completely wouldn't-bloody-stop-going-on-about-it excited. That racecourse also just so happens to have a brown sign, so I am officially calling this trip research. The first horse race ever to...

Read more >>

Today I'm researching the history of fishing for my never-ending exhaustive book about the pursuits one can undertake by following brown tourist signs. This leisure fishing (not fishing for commercial or survival purposes) is referred to by people with sticks ("fishing rods") and maggots ("bait") as "angling". Because I've embarked on an absolutely enormous project with this whole brown signs malarky I've begun to realise that my research reflects virtually every activity of any description that has evolved from the beginning of time - from sleeping to white water rafting and about...

Read more >>

After my visit to the Long Player project in Trinity Lighthouse a few weeks ago (audiovisual tour of my experience here: Long Player Project) I was inspired by my research of the composer and artist, Jem Finer, to visit another one of his music/art installations which is (quite literally) buried deep in an ancient woodland-come-arts-extravaganza near Challock in Kent. His piece is called "A Score for a Hole in the Ground" and was inspired by the tranquil sounds of Japanese singing bowls. The installation uses a series of bowls sunk down deep into the...

Read more >>