When I was a young, penniless and carefree student, one of my great delights was traveling to new and interesting places. Sometimes I would set off with only the vaguest notion of where I was heading, preferring chance encounters to dictate my next adventure.
My travels took me on a Greyhound bus across Canada from Montreal to Victoria, on Vancouver Island and down the West coast through San Francisco and Los Angeles to Tijawana in Mexico and back by the Grand Canyon. I discovered that people have a way of passing you from friend to friend: 'I have a friend in Calgary. I'll call them. You must stay a night with them.' or 'I have a friend in Australia. I'll email them and tell them you are coming'.
A couple of years later I traveled overland to India through Iran and Afghanistan and the Khyber Pass. Light-years on I have a headful of wonderful memories of the adventures I had, places I saw and people I met, some of whom have become lifelong friends.
Brought up in Northumberland, the local blackface sheep featured large in my life. As a schoolgirl, my greatest joy was to spend holidays in the Cheviot hills helping with the lambing in spring and clipping in the summer. I still have a great affection for blackface sheep, and the people who work with them.
There is nothing more endearing than a tiny blackface lamb.
Inspired by Paddington Bear and a traveling garden gnome, I am creating some tiny Northumbrian blackface sheep and plan to send them traveling. There are ten of them. Each with a name, a passport and a diary. They will be traveling for a year and hopefully will be back in Northumberland in time for Christmas 2011.
I look forward to discovering where they have been.
It is my intention to have an exhibition in 2012 and produce an illustrated book of their adventures.
I shall start their adventure by sending them to ten friends in different parts of the world. I shall ask them to send me a post card from their visiting Northumbrian sheep telling me where they are, who they are staying with and what they are doing. Then I would like them to write something in his/her diary and mark their passport. I would also like them to send, or email, me a few phots of themselves with their visiting sheep, taken in their own environment.It might be in a Maasai village, a well known landscape icon, a favourite beach, next to a town or village sign. Maybe even sailing, skiing or in a night club.
Then I shall ask them to send their sheep on its journey to one of their own friends to do the same.
I shall post pictures and news on this blog spot so we can all follow their progress.
Please tell your friends to watch this space!
