Off his trolley

Anyone who has ever used a supermarket shopping trolley will have suffered the indignity of getting it jammed against the shelves or seeing it spin out of control in the car park.

Spare a thought then for Mark McGowan. While most of us are glad simply to get to our car boot with the week's supplies intact, he is planning to get all the way from London to Glasgow in one.

Not that he will be doing anything as easy as pushing the trolley on its 400-odd mile journey, no. He plans to make his way to Scotland using a sheet rigged up as a sail and an old broom as an oar.

The last time Mr McGowan, 37, tried this sort of stunt he suffered nothing worse than a sore nose and a mixture of admiration and ridicule from a bemused public.

In September, the Peckham-based artist took 10 days to roll a peanut with his nose from Goldsmiths College to Downing Street, in protest at student debt.

This time, defying traffic and hypothermia, he will take an estimated nine months to complete his journey.

He is undertaking it, he says, as an act of contrition for what the English did to the Scots, William "Braveheart" Wallace in particular.

Before embarking on his route north, Mr McGowan said: "The performance/event I see as a kind of reconciliation for the William Wallace thing. A kind of peacekeeping/goodwill mission to try to bridge the English-Scottish divide. I want to try to bring these two great countries back together."

Mr McGowan is fond of grand gestures. In October, shortly after completing his peanut-rolling feat, he sat in a bath of beans for 100 hours in support of the full English breakfast.

Setting off yesterday, Mr McGowan sounded more nervous than heroic. "It's raining and windy, but I suppose that might help with the sailing. The trolley doesn't go very far, but I could ask passers-by to push me for a bit.