Follow The Brown Signs

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Obsessed with following brown tourist signs, passionate about museums, adventure, travel, discovery, sleeper trains, curators and collectors, the esoteric and obscure

I followed the brown signs to Prema Arts Centre, Uley in Uley this evening to start an 8 week life drawing class. This b...
30/09/2026

I followed the brown signs to Prema Arts Centre, Uley in Uley this evening to start an 8 week life drawing class. This bloody brilliant arts venue in a converted chapel is hidden away in a little unassuming village in rural Gloucestershire, but woof does it still manage to showcase the most incredible artists, with awesome exhibitions on all the time and a huge array of courses and workshops, which even those who are so bad at art they can’t even draw ears on a rabbit (like me) can thankfully join.

Hope you enjoy my first efforts drawing a guy in the buff.

My husband tells me I spent too long on his nether regions. Frankly I don’t think I spent anywhere near long enough (apols to the model, your nethers really don’t look like that in real life).

No, dear reader, there are no brown tourist signs on the Faroe Islands. That’s not to say there are no museums of course...
26/08/2026

No, dear reader, there are no brown tourist signs on the Faroe Islands. That’s not to say there are no museums of course (there’s about ten) but the roadsign pointing to them is not shaded in my beloved “tourist sign brown”. Given my obsession I naturally I felt mildly disappointed, but I didn’t mind too much, because as well as the brilliant Faroese institutions that have collected the fascinating history, stories and artworks of this most beguiling of island nations, really it was the bare, raw, seismic nature of these striking isles, their stark, jagged landscapes and treeless wild North Atlanticness, their totally enveloping, constant gentle sweeping fogs and fat cloud-patched skies that drew me here.

Given my aversion to flying I dragged my poor long suffering family with me on this 3,500 mile round trip, covering seven countries over land and wild, puke-inducing seas. For me travelling is my destination, I loved every slow day we spent journeying… my family however like a normal holiday, an easily gettable-to destination, and also would probably just prefer to be at home if anyone had actually asked where they’d like to spend their summer… tough times for them.

That said, not a human on earth could fail to love the Faroes. Our time on these islands was spent shooting through impossibly narrow tunnels hollowed out of towering hillsides, wandering hidden red, green and black painted villages, scaling vertiginous cliffs to watch puffins come in for wind buffeted and comedically splay-footed landings, watching the sunset over grass turfed churches, walking with dreadlocked woolly sheep, being on boats thrown violently around by the ever present waves of the Atlantic not matter what the weather and sitting quietly watching Faroese harbour life. The skies, seas, channels and fjords here are constantly changing, they merge in and out of each other and make you feel like you’re really truly in the landscape, like you’re being quietly daubed into a thickly applied oil seascape painting. It was completely magical.

Dolphins hooned around in the wake of our ship coming home and I got to watch Muckle Flugga lighthouse as we passed too ❤️

Once again I find myself reading the shipping forecast (in my mind like a posh BBC newsreader) in advance of another lon...
18/08/2026

Once again I find myself reading the shipping forecast (in my mind like a posh BBC newsreader) in advance of another long ferry crossing on smyrilline to the Faroe Islands. This time I have no less than five shipping areas to check; Fisher, South Utsire (don’t think I make it quite north enough for North Utsire sadly), Viking, Fair Isle (so beguiling) and Faeroes.

Don’t like the look of nearby bastards Bailey and Hebrides at all, both highlighted in gale warning red. North easterly gale force 8, cyclonic and becoming cyclonic respectively ffs. Would you simmer down you two and stop blasting your north easterly gale in my ferry’s direction please? Ideally I’d like to see your sea condition becoming slight, or better smooth later if you wouldn’t mind… appreciate that this is total fantasy however and is not going to happen 🌬️🛳️ 🤢

800+ miles done, 200 left to go on this most epic of road trips to get up to Hirtshals in northern Denmark for our ferry...
17/08/2026

800+ miles done, 200 left to go on this most epic of road trips to get up to Hirtshals in northern Denmark for our ferry to the Faroe Islands tomorrow morning. Many many many brown sign photos taken but only one actually followed (to the fab Dutch theme park Efteling).

Gloucestershire to London 🚊 to Dover 🚗 to Dunkirk ⛴️ 10 minutes of France, into Belgium, onto The Netherlands, then Germ...
15/08/2026

Gloucestershire to London 🚊 to Dover 🚗 to Dunkirk ⛴️ 10 minutes of France, into Belgium, onto The Netherlands, then Germany and all the way through Denmark 🚗 to catch another ⛴️ to The Faroes

No human has helped me to question, frame my thoughts, feel and truly see humanity and this chaotic modern world I find ...
07/07/2026

No human has helped me to question, frame my thoughts, feel and truly see humanity and this chaotic modern world I find so hard to live in more than artist (and bodhisattva on earth) Ai Weiwei

His truly exceptional exhibition Button Up! at Factory International in Manchester showcases some of Ai Wei Wei’s elaborate, important and thought provoking installations that force us to ask questions about the world around us, about how the modern world we live in was shaped, the cost of it and its ongoing legacy playing out in our societies and politics right now.

Ai Wei Wei draws on many themes throughout his works such as war, human exploitation, migration, freedom, craft and materials, arbitrary borders, power and censorship, freedom of speech, art as a tool of subversion, and its fundamental importance of expression which is so vital all human societies. Ai Wei Wei acknowledges that he became a political activist when he visited Sichuan in China in 2008 after over five thousand school children lost their lives when shoddily built school buildings collapsed on them during earthquakes.

His piece Nian Nian (Commemoration) 2021 is a recording of people reading every single name of every child who died in the earthquakes and is audible throughout the exhibition.

It is so damn moving here, and so full of humanity and respect and honour of humans and their right to freedom, that it was impossible for me not to be close to tears the minute I walked in, but when I stood listening to the children’s names being read aloud, and to the emotion of the readers, I openly cried and cried.

Read all about it here https://factoryinternational.org/whats-on/ai-weiwei-button-up/ and go if you can. Ai Wei Wei is a f*cling incredible, immense and important human being and I for one am thankful and honoured to be alive when he is, and walking this very same earth he walks on.

Some spectacular brown-signing-come-home-education on the Isle of Wight this week, lots of jumping over crashing waves, ...
04/06/2026

Some spectacular brown-signing-come-home-education on the Isle of Wight this week, lots of jumping over crashing waves, watching The Nothing from the Neverending Story roll in, then forcing our children to take long walks in it.

Extra special shout out to the fabulous founded by diver and salvager extraordinaire Martin Woodward with a collection so wonderful, irony and brassy you could feel the weight of it all as you walk in. My favourites were the toothbrushes and a merman. Bought a map of all the shipwrecks on the Isle of Wight and half wish I could dive down and see one, half can’t think of anything worse (but absolutely love the massive yellow “protected wreck” buoys telling you one lurks below… Martin Woodward and his fellow divers, one of whom showed us all around and was so knowledgable and enthusiastic it was what my brown-signing-home-ed dreams are made of. Diver Woodward and founder of this cool museum bought his own wreck ffs, what a legend.

Now with a unquashable urge to visit we’re off with for a fleeting visit to La Belle France leaving from Newhaven Harbour, its railway station boasting views of the open jaws of our soon to be listing and rolling ferry over the channel.

For me absolutely nothing parallels starting a book by (this is if you want to know). Boyd is my absolute favourite a...
25/05/2026

For me absolutely nothing parallels starting a book by (this is if you want to know). Boyd is my absolute favourite author of all time and (like I do with Haruki Murakami) I long to speak to him after I finish every one of his books. He’s thankfully prolific and anything he ever writes just never ever disappoints. I think about his novels and short stories, and all his diverse and rich protagonists therin all the bloody time.

Think how wonderful an exercise it would be to all start writing our lives in parts in the style of a William Boyd novel, pinpointing the significant places and people that have shaped and define us, I bet every single one of our stories would make publishable reading. Because not a lot has to happen in a lifetime, nor does it have to be exciting or wildly remarkable, it’s much more about the insightful and beautiful painting of this magnificent, chaotic thing we call life, how people decide to live it, and all the other messy humans we navigate it with, that Boyd does best.

I think reading him throughout my life has helped me appreciate and wonder at small and easily overlooked things, which has in turn made my own life richer and more beautiful, exactly not because my life is exciting, but because I find myself seeing the most mundane things through a Boydian lens. Actually when I’m feeling like my life is especially boring and wildly unremarkable this happens a lot, I think “how would William Boyd write that bit?” and I always try and find a thread, something he would see and notice, and weave it into the tapestry of my own story.

So from now on I think I’m going to quietly navigate the world pretending I’m a William Boyd protagonist. At some point I’ll send the man himself all my notes and get him to write me a book. You’re welcome and also prepare yourself ❤️ William Boyd

About six years ago I asked my friend to lend me the best, fattest book she owned. I was going in to hospital for regul...
25/03/2026

About six years ago I asked my friend to lend me the best, fattest book she owned. I was going in to hospital for regular immunotherapy treatment and wanted a book to read that I only read there. I don’t know why. In hindsight maybe I wanted the normal time I had at home with my kids (and the book I was reading on my bedside table), to be separate from my hospital/admitting-I-was-ill time, so it was a way to compartmentalise it I guess.

The book Jo “lent” me was Carter Beats The Devil by Glen David Gold (which I never gave back, so let’s be honest actually I stole it, sorry about that). I consumed it in six sittings and I absolutely LOVED it. It’s a brilliant, bit of an alternative book. Beautifully written, full of variety, immense characters, joy, tragedy, humour, mystery and encapsulates the exciting newness vibe of early 1920s America, just like The (bloody superlative) Great Gatsby does. Weirdly though I’d never heard of it and I’ve never heard mention of it since. Which is a good thing, obviously I urge you to buy it and consume it immediately.

Our protagonist, Charles Carter, is an illusionist and magician who we first meet staging a daring trick with the actual President of the USA. The trick, called Carter beats the devil, is a success onstage but mysteriously a few hours later the president is found dead, and Carter is the number one suspect. The book charts his passion and his life and the fundamentally changing world he’s living in.

The book ultimately leads us to the birth of television and a world on the cusp of such huge change in entertainment that it will never be the same again. So will Carter’s illusions, amazing live shows and tricks of the eye ever be akin to the newfangled, awe-inspiring invention of television?

I post this because it’s relevant to the aces Museum of Television that I went to in Toronto today, which was so sh****ng amazing I’ll obvs do a separate post ASAP, but I just had to post about Carter Beats The Devil first. Hope you understand 🙏 (and also hope you read it).

Hey Toronto👋 um, your tourist signs aren’t brown..? Crushing disappointment being felt right now not gonna lie, but hey ...
25/03/2026

Hey Toronto👋 um, your tourist signs aren’t brown..? Crushing disappointment being felt right now not gonna lie, but hey your streets are pretty darn cool 👌🏼

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