I'm moving this blog to my new website...

Hello you,

If you've just stumbled upon me and my brown sign project then great, welcome along! I used to use this blog to tell interested readers about all my travels discovering Britain by following brown tourist signs, but I've always thought that getting out there and doing it for yourself is what it's all about, so I'm in the process of building a website with loads of information, stories and brown signed attractions on it which you can use to get inspiration to go brown signing yourself.

The website is here www.followthebrownsigns.com and my often ridiculous but funny travels around Britain following brown signs still happen, they are here www.followthebrownsigns.com/blog too if you're interested.

Thanks for the visit, I hope you enjoy the new site and please do get involved :)

It seems I can't stop banging on about men on the moon...

... but when my sister got sent the link to this video I thought I must share it. What I love most, apart from loving the song and it reminding of me of my teenage years when The Mose would play R.E.M. on a loop, mooning around the house adoring Michael Stipe a little more than is healthy, I also love what lies behind the story of the song.

Mikey Stipey, as he has become affectionately known in our house (even my 86 year old Dad knows who we're talking about when we mention Mikey) said this about recording the song for the 7th day wake up message to crew of the last space shuttle mission "I recorded 'Man on The Moon' for NASA in Venice, Italy, where Galileo first presented to the Venetian government his eight-power telescope, and in 1610 wrote 'The Starry Messenger' (Sidereus Nuncius), an account of his early astronomical discoveries that altered forever our view of our place in the universe."

The song isn't just relevant for it's appropriate lyrics as a wake up call to people in space (especially given the 35th anniversary of the first ever moon landing is tomorrow!) it's greatness comes in that it is also a song inspired by the people who had the insight and desire to discover what lay beyond our reaches here on earth, and even human comprehension out there in space over 400 years ago. Galileo and his early sky watching pals would have been absolutely in awe of our accomplishments of getting men into space and on the moon and I find these things totally fascinating. What an absolute dude (both Galileo and Stipey, obviously). This brought a tear to my eye, enjoy.

Random Brown Sign of the Day - The National Space Centre

Today, after about 3 weeks working solid 14 hour shifts at my restaurant, I am back in the game (the very best game I know: The Brown Sign Game) and in honour of my return I thought I'd feature a big fat impressive attraction on random brown sign of the day and it doesn't get much bigger than space does it? So today children we're going to be talking about The National Space Centre.

This pretty amazing attraction is in Leicester and I cannot tell you how many times I've had friends driving up or down the M1 who text me about the brilliant and distinctive brown signs directing you there with the huge rocket logo on them (just imagining it makes me want to get in the car right now and take a trip up there to see it for myself), even the address excites me, it's on Exploration Drive for heaven's sake, genius.

All aboard for some Swanage steam train action

The Mose and I went down to Dorset for a few days over the Easter break, mainly because I was wetting myself at the prospect of having a little go on the Swanage Steam Railway after they signed themselves up to my Brown Sign Way website.

This railway line wasn't actually one of the many hundreds across the country that were pulled up and abandoned after Dr Richard Beeching overhauled the railway network in the infamous Becching Report of 1963. This report saw the closure of around a third of all railway lines across Britain (luckily for us though many have now been restored and got themselves a brown sign). This line, which runs from Norden (just north of Corfe Castle) down to the beach and Swanage, was closed in 1972 after British Rail deemed the line simply not profitable enough to sustain, which aroused much local consternation and upset, as you can imagine. Just 3 years later though The Swanage Railway Project was set up by a group of dedicated volunteers (God I love them) and the painstaking task of relaying the line and restoring the railway back to it's former glory was begun. It took over 30 years to complete but finally the first passenger service to run from London all the way through to Swanage via Wareham arrived on the 1st of May 2009.

Me talking on BBC Lincolnshire about The Brown Sign Way

I have a permanent Twitter search set for "brown sign" on my TweetDeck that pulls up any tweet with the words "brown" and "sign" in it. So whenever anyone tweets about brown signs I always tweet them back, tell them what I'm doing and point them to my website. The relevant ones are usually people going down the motorway tweeting "OMG I'm so excited! We've just gone past the first brown sign for Alton Towers!" Others have been rants about the council not replacing stolen or defaced brown signs and sometimes it's random directions to places involving brown signs. Most of the time though the search brings up chat about whether American basketball players or rap stars with surnames "Brown" will "sign" to a new team or record label, obviously not very relevant to The Brown Sign Way but it does mean I'm well clued up about Chris Brown at the moment, so if you ever want to know what's going down him then I'm your gal...

Anyway today the "brown sign" search came up with a tweet by BBC Radio Lincolnshire DJ William Wright, his tweet was this "Has seeing a brown sign ever made you visit somewhere you hadn't thought about going? There's a campaign for Lincoln brown signs on A1". I got very very excited and tweeted that chap straight back, telling him about my website and that of course I'm well up for that brown sign campaign. After a few more tweets and some convincing I was interviewed by said DJ on his drive time show talking about the thing I love the very best, The Brown Sign Way.

It is below if you'd like to listen to it, just click the link and when it's loaded in the window skip to 1:43 (1 hour 43 minutes into the show) and then you'll hear me powering on through my terrible cold and sounding like the true south Londoner I am but didn't realise was quite so pronounced in my accent. Enjoy!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/p00g9ftw

Or the recording here if it's no longer on iPlayer: