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

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 is electricity, more often that not this comes in the boring form of late night shopping under glowing fat plastic santas down the local high street, so clearly this option was going to be far more interesting.
The Electric Forest is a combined effort between The Forestry Commission and Culture Creative which aims to wow visitors by spectacularly showing off this gorgeous woodland through the medium of technicolour and noise. An hour long walk winds through the trees and lakes with surprises all along the way. I like collaborations, the result is usually a refreshing new take on something we thought we knew and when they bring out the very best of brown signed attractions I like them even more.

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

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 in Hertfordshire near St Albans (I'm slowly accumulating a massive list of recommended attractions with brown signs) so I looked it up, and to my joy I found a pretty exciting project happening on this former forgotten wasteland just off the motorway.

Have I got Mapping News for you...

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 all my posts. After the initial excitement and massive undertaking though I realised that visitor numbers weren't about to increase by a billion but as the article will mainly be read school children (and you) I thought it best to tone down the swearing somewhat.

Anyway, here I am on page 16, why not sit down with a nice cup of tea and have a little read?

Exciting stuff!

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

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 I don't really watch TV (when I do I only watch something I really want to see) or read the papers (well, that'll be nothing actually because I find it extremely hard to read any newspapers at all), it's also why I mute the TV if I happen to be watching anything with adverts spliced in. I understand that advertising works, but to be honest it makes me feel a bit depressed that it may well work on me, so I avoid it wherever possible. Don't get me wrong, I do know that advertising is vital for most businesses to survive but I'm talking about advertising gone mental.

The most appropriately spent Roald Dahl Day ever

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. I do love my unpaid, money-draining job.
Everyone loves Roald Dahl. Mention his name to any passing person, young or old, and it's likely you'll get an immediate smile and some happy recollections of long afternoons spent reading a favourite Dahl classic. I, of course, also read Roald Dahl, but I have to admit I only actually liked reading some of his books, these were (in order of preference) Danny The Champion of The World, The BFG and Fantastic Mr Fox.