London is a paradise for graffitologists. From spidery scrawls on subway walls to the fine art extravaganzas of Banksy and Cartrain, London's walls have something for everyone.
Over the past two months, however, a new kind of graffiti has started appearing. Always it says the same thing, always in the same hand. Ancient Babylonians were mystified by graffiti that read Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin. Modern Londoners are similarly baffled, but this time the graffiti reads Brooke Shields Alphabet.
Is this a viral marketing stunt? Is it the name of a band? Is it someone's idea of a practical joke? Nobody seems to know.
The scrawl has appeared in so many locations that attempts have been made to plot them on a map. Would the bigger picture reveal any clues? Perhaps the locations, when plotted, would form a noticeable pattern - a pentagram, or a sign of the zodiac, or a constellation. But no such patterns emerged.
Photographers have gathered online to compare notes, posting their images of the Brooke Shields Alphabet to a dedicated Flickr site. There they all are, side by side, images of walls all bearing the same cryptic message, all revealing nothing but the words themselves.
The plot thickened recently when a MySpace Music page appeared, from a person or group claiming to be the Brooke Shields Alphabet. The page has since been exposed as a hoax, the work of mischievous trolls intent on adding further confusion to an already notorious mystery.
The words have now started to appear on walls in Amsterdam and Hamburg, and yet it remains probable that we'll simply never know what the Brooke Shields Alphabet is all about. What we do know, however - as if we needed telling - is that the writing on the wall is as powerful, as intriguing, as potent today as it was back in Ancient Babylon.
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