I've been walking to and from work this week, partly in an effort to get more exercise and lose some weight, but mainly because a twenty-minute hike up a steep hill in the pouring rain is significantly less stressful than trying to get my car started on a cold morning.

So at lunchtime today, instead of jumping into my car, I jumped to the conclusion that the shops in Lewes Road were probably only a five minute walk away, and set off down the hill from Brighton General with a bagel in my hand and a song in my heart. Well, my MP3 player. Unfortunately geography never was my strong point. Frankly it would have been quicker to walk home and back. By the time I'd stood in a branch of Spar for five minutes trying to find a picture of Chloe in a copy of Full House magazine, it was time to head back up the hill to work.

But despite having burnt off my bagel before I was halfway up Elm Grove, and worked up an appetite just as my lunch hour was over, I don't regret making the trip. After all, if I hadn't walked along Lewes Road, I'd never have seen this sign stuck to a phone box...


In Brighton we don't have lost dogs, we have lost paintings of dogs.

At first I thought it was a brilliant piece of satirical humour, poking fun at the trend of 'lost pet' posters, but apparently not. Having entered the immortal phrase 'lost 2 paintings' into Google, I arrived at this page. It seems those doggone pictures are the work of Anton Cataldo, professional pet portraitist and absent-minded motorist. Apparently he left them on the roof of his car, then drove around The Level until they fell off. He's claiming it was an accident, but frankly if he'd filmed the act, he could enter it for the Turner Prize as a piece of performance art.

Anyway, the irony is that on Sunday, the very day in question, I was walking around The Level, recovering from my descent down Muesli Mountain, and wondering how many potatoes I could fit into Amelie's buggy. I did see a couple of dogs, but sadly neither of them were flying towards me on canvas from the roof of a moving vehicle. Which is a real shame. I could have swapped the hundred pound reward for a painting of Chloe. And he might have thrown in a packet of picture hooks.