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If I died and went to brown sign heaven I would spend eternity doing days like this….

February 20, 2011
So this is me on Saturday at 6.30am after approximately 5.5 hours sleep and guess what, I was in a stinker of a mood. Anyone who's ever had the displeasure of being anywhere near me when I've had less than 10 hours sleep knows it's not a nice experience and the reason for my lack of sleep wasn't even from a night on the tiles, sadly no. It was after a hectic Friday night waitressing, where I made so many mistakes that I frequently wanted to burst out crying, so...

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Staring down the barrel of some massive guns

February 15, 2011
A few weeks ago I noticed a museum on Twitter which immediately attracted my attention. Why? Because it's called "Explosion!" that's why, now you're interested, see? I especially liked the use of the hard hitting exclamation mark so I had a lot of respect for them straight away. This Portsmouth based museum looked like just the kind of place I love the very best, with dedicated passionate staff and an impressive repertoire of activities and exhibits which chart the history and importance of naval firepower. However, as much as I...

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I’m a big fan of this brown sign bandwagon

January 25, 2011
During my extensive research of the brown signed attractions of Britain I have discovered some pretty cool things going on all over the country that are either run or linked up with brown signs. The website I am building (www.thebrownsignway.com) will have an area dedicated to my findings don't you worry but I thought I would share this one with you in the mean time.

www.visitwoods.org.uk is an exciting programme set up by The Woodlands Trust in conjunction with other organisations like The National Trust, the RSPB, the Forestry...

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If you can’t beat ’em join ’em

January 15, 2011
Spot the difference...

That's right all you eagled eyed ladies and gentlemen out there, the top brown sign is FAKE!

My visual cortex has more cell space than most dedicated to the colour brown on sign shaped objects, so I'm very good at noticing oddities in brown tourist signs. Over the years I've noticed quite a few fake brown signs but usually I've been on a motorway somewhere when taking a picture would be more dangerous than normal so I've never recorded the event. To my delight I...

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Walk, don’t run, around Norman Park

January 2, 2011
Today I felt both fenced in and lethargic. New year's hangovers hang around man. Living in deepest suburbia means it's pretty hard to just skip out of your front door and have a big walk in the countryside to blow away the cobwebs, also unfortunately for me I can't afford to insure the pile of crap that is my car so I couldn't even drive off to the nearest heritage trail.

So my sister and I took a walk around the streets of Bromley. Luckily I could also...

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Beware callers asking questions about brown tourist signs

December 31, 2010
This morning I've been calling attractions around the country, especially the quirky smaller ones which may not hear about my quest to fill my map of Britain with brown signed attractions. I don't want to leave them out and they're a big part of The Brown Sign Way after all. So I called a small house and garden in Leicestershire (which shall remain nameless) and started the conversation in much the same way as I usually do, encountering the standard confusion I always get when explaining my project, but I...

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Jeager Bombs and a 1000 year old priory (not both together though mind)

December 18, 2010
photoSo this week came in the form of a holiday with my Dad down in Bournemouth. I do love hanging with people when they take trips around the UK so I can discover all the local brown signs in the area for very little cost to my very poor self, thanks parents, love you. After settling in at the lovely sea view hotel I decided to do some planning for all the brown signing I could do around these parts, but first things first. Did you know that exploration of...

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Let me tell you about The Man Who Planted Trees

December 9, 2010
I feel a bit bad that recently I've been focussing a lot on my website and getting it to look all nice and attractive and inspiring for visitors but also sacrificing time on the blog and actually going out brown signing. Brown signs, you are still in my heart as I sit most days into the night tapping away at the computer learning how to build a website for you and unearthing research to populate it with *punches chest*.

In lieu of any brown signing activity then I'll draw...

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This forest is electric (can I be electric too?)

November 12, 2010
When I heard from my best friend "Beaks" that the brown signed Bedgebury Pinetum and Forest (near the village of Flimwell just off the A21 in Kent) had been transformed into a stunning festival of light and sound at sundown, I was more than a little bit excited at the prospect of a visit. Not too many brown signed attractions are open in the evening and as the winter draws in nothing beats donning a massive puffa jacket and venturing outside to explore your freezing surroundings by the wonder that...

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A lepidopterist called Clive, a gigantic ant and a very hungry caterpillar

October 25, 2010
After spending most of the weekend sitting inside working hard on the design and images for my exciting new website, I thought that Sunday afternoon should be reserved for some brown-signing proper. Autumn for me is all about getting out and enjoying the romantic long shadows the low sun casts, wrapping up against the cold, seeing new things and having a nice cup of tea in a little attraction cafe afterall. I'd been told about a brown sign with a butterfly on it just off the M25 at junction 21a...

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Have I got Mapping News for you…

October 23, 2010
http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/education/pdf/mn38pdf.pdf

Mapping News is the brilliant quarterly journal published by the dedicated map chaps at The Ordnance Survey. As if it wasn't exciting enough already this Autumn's edition also features an article about me and my brown signing adventures, they've even included some of my badly composed photographs (usually taken while hanging out of my car while driving slowly around roundabouts). With such coverage I decided that visitors to my blog might suddenly sky rocket so I undertook the not insignificant task of removing all the rude words from...

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Along The Brown Sign Way all signs are created equal, and thankfully none are created more equal than others.

September 27, 2010
This morning I was sitting on the train reading The Corporation by Joel Bakan, a book essentially about the power and influence that corporations and businesses have over us, the lay people of this world, and it began to make me feel a little bit sick. I find it so sad that advertising and marketing techniques actually work on people in the first place. I've never liked people telling me what to do or being subjected to opinion I'm just not that interested in, it's one of the reasons...

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The most appropriately spent Roald Dahl Day ever

September 13, 2010
After my huge excitement at finding out this morning that it is in fact Roald Dahl Day today it seemed only right that I should visit The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre at my soonest convenience. Happily I was already heading Buckinghamshire way to work on the exciting design of my new website with a man who knows his Photoshop. So when we should have been sitting down to some serious work, instead, after my not-too-strong persuasion, we were getting into the car and heading off to Great Missenden....

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Top secret Brown Sign Mission: Codes, 1984 computers and reusable condoms

September 5, 2010
I've wanted to visit Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire for some time. I like all things history, war and intrigue and Bletchley Park, where ingenious code breakers spent sleepless days and nights in make shift huts cracking the infamous German Enigma code, has to be the place to go to get all that. A good friend of mine (who also happens to be my ex-boyfriend) volunteered to come with me, good thing too, how else would I have completed the "know your planes - friend or foe?" game with almost 100%...

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A "I walk past that sign every day and I’ve never visited" day

August 11, 2010
In one of my more random and terribly unsuitable jobs I worked for a few months at the fine chocolatier Mr Paul A Young's (I don't like chocolate, really, not even at all) in Islington, North London. Every day on my way to work from King's Cross I walked past this brown sign for The London Canal Museum and I'm ashamed to say, in all the time I worked there, and despite my obsession with brown tourist signs, I never visited. Shame on me, and what an error that was,...

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A little history of ice skating

August 7, 2010
It was the long cold North European winters that inspired the invention of the ice skate. The earliest known example is over 5000 years old and was found at the bottom of a Swiss lake (I assume the chap wearing them rather overestimated their capabilities) and were fashioned from animal bone and leather straps which attached to the skaters shoe. Early records indicate that ice skaters using poles to propel themselves across frozen lakes and rivers “as swiftly as birds” was a common sight in the colder climes across the...

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My day at the office

August 2, 2010
I thought I might share some non-brown-sign related thoughts with you today in the absence of any brown signed attractions filling my waking hours. It has been a funny day, well, an enlightening one at least. I knew things wouldn't be normal when I burst out crying after reading The Man, Richard Branson's morning blog post entitled "in it for the fun, not just the money". The Man describes the drive and motivation behind starting out on your own, and this was the sentence that started those little tears a-comin': "I...

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Gooone fishin’…

July 30, 2010
The nights sleep, despite significant tiredness when we hit the sack, was not such a good one, in fact, let's be honest, it can probably be ranked as one of the worst ever. Predictably I hadn't checked the weather forecast before we left and assumed that being in mid July meant likelihood of good weather. Unfortunately I was proved wrong (as always) at around 1 am when the heavens opened and we were rained on hard for the next 6 solid hours. I had nightmares of the tent, and ourselves,...

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More More Moor (that’s how I like it, that’s how I like it)

July 23, 2010
The next brown sign trip started with a pretty much uninterrupted drive up to Robin Hood's Bay, just south of Whitby in the North York Moors. By "pretty much" uninterrupted I mean it did include a quick stop at an OK Diner on the A1. OK Diners are the most amazing motorway services ever and leave me dumbfounded as to why they haven't made their way down south to replace the horrendous Little Chefs I am so used to avoiding. These restaurants have totally pulled off the 1950s-themed diner experience,...

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On another bear hunt…

July 18, 2010
Time to do another brown sign trip! Heading for Robin Hood's bay today, just north of Scarborough. Because of the long drive up there the estimated time of leaving was approx 9.30 (get up and go for a 2 hour run at 7 am come back get in the car and go) but here I am still buying fishing rod licences online and digging very spider infested camping chairs out of the shed.  Perhaps a more accurate time will be 11.30. Ho hum.
I have fishing booked for Tuesday and...

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