I never knew sandwich boards could be so emotional

It's Monday. I think Aha, the sandwich board will be outside the Co-op! I can photograph an example of graphic material and textual language constructing my environment!

After fifteen minutes, I've seen so many, and become so aware of how my walking needs to change around them - been submerged so deep in their rich textures of time, mood, voice and my recollections - that I've begun to cross the road to avoid them, to take the quiet way home and rest.

These propped up staggered sandwich board advertisements are everywhere.

Why didn't I notice so many of them before? I feel a little ashamed. I've walked past these obvious plastic / metal / wood / blackboard constructions, made in a variety of shapes and heights using a variety of fastenings - some with articulated movements, some with creaky hinges, some flapping at me waving, and some that make me walk in a frankly bizarre side-stepping manner just short of the gutter. And how many did I notice before?!

Well, I notice now, and this is what I'm thinking.

They mark time, these visual metronomes. At 10 am on a Monday morning I knew in advance these signs would be on the streets. I had them in my sense of the hour. Now I walk along with them, I feel they are like a dance of time, creating the routines of time, day, night, keeping their quiet rhythm with commerce, appearing with the morning and retreating in the evening. But there's a sidestep in the routines, one day each week, and bank holidays, take a skip for retail closure.

But day-by-day, their place shifts and moves my pavement territory. While their words do not explain events here, on the pavement, they show me some other location, nearby: they tell me of elsewhere but carve out place now, take my space, push me into roads, send me into body weaves with other passers-by, force me to side-step, swerve, walk in angular curves.

As I walk, I watch their words which stay the same and change. Here is a street of poetry and song; here is a polyphony, this Song of the sandwich board - a street for many voices. The words can change daily, weekly, Special offer, New this Week, Open Now, Happy Hippies, or the voices look to stay for longer, be with me through the summer, were there in my past, perhaps a low steady beat to my season or a year - play here find out more book your eye test think food.

These words are my street collage of history, memory, prediction, expectation. Mapped emotionally in a geographic space I would expect to see a strange patterning of remembering and desire - ice cream on a hot day; comfort and consolation - coffee on the go; anticipation and thrill - a lottery ticket that just might win; duty and responsibility - my obligations to the cat, the dog, the food, the house. These pools of text, not in themselves emotional, but leading me along a street of states I might remember or for comfort want to repeat, again and again, send flowers hot drinks open books open.