The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

The mists hang merrily over the cold fields of Eartham village in West Sussex.

This is not the glorious image of the winter solstice sunrise that I had been planning for you. Events conspired against that.

The original plan had been to drive up to a semi-secret location in the South Downs and take a picture of the sun rising in what were originally forecast to be clear cold skies.

Yesterday morning I was driving the four miles from home to the gym but all four wheels of the Land Rover Defender lost traction on black ice and I slid headfirst into a substantial tree at about 25 miles-per-hour. I walked away from the car-and-tree amalgamation and felt very lucky to be in much better shape than either. My next thought was that my wife and kids were due to set out on the same road an hour after I had. My mobile phone was on charge at home. I ended up having to…

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Yesterday afternoon I threw the snow off the Land Rover and headed out into the white – I had about half-a-dozen minor outstanding ‘to-do’s for the book, but there is no point writing a book about natural navigation if you are the sort of person who can resist these conditions. Dressed in a suitably ridiculous balaclava I made my way to the foot of Halnaker Hill and then proceeded uphill in wellies. Unless I’m on a mountain I find wellington boots with two pairs of socks the ideal footwear for small excursions in snow, even good hill-walking boots let some moisture in eventually, but wellies do at least stay dry even if it means slipping about a bit in places.

A roe deer jumped across the path in front of me as I climbed the hill and there was the red breast of a robin waiting on the branch…

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The morning light over the past couple of days has been spectacular. It has made me want to reach for my easel and whip up a painting. Unfortunately I can’t paint.

A restless night for lots of reasons, but that did at least allow some good Geminid-watching. Most meteor, ie. shooting star, showers occur when Earth passes through the dusty trail of a comet. The particles burn brightly as they hit our atmosphere. The Geminid meteors are some of the most dependable for night-skywatchers, taking place each year in mid-December and characterised by relatively slow moving yellow burning points. They appear to originate in the part of the sky that is home to the constellation Gemini, hence the name. The exact nature of the object causing the Geminid showers is less well understood. It has the beautiful name, Phaethon, was discovered in 1983 and is believed to be a now burnt-out comet, but may actually be closer to an asteroid.

The best meteor I saw last night, while well wrapped up and standing in the neighbouring field, burned for about two…

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A thick cold damp mist is bogged in over the South Downs this morning. I haven’t been out much this week as I seem to have been zooming up and down the A roads to the Royal Geographical Society and back. On Monday night it was the last president, Prof Sir Gordon Conway’s farewell lecture followed by a black tie dinner with the new President, Michael Palin CBE. Good food for mind and body and, as always at the RGS, great company and stories round the tables.

Yesterday I gave my Beginner’s Guide to Natural Navigation course for another wonderfully diverse gang. A smattering of walkers, pilots and sailors, but among them a filmmaker, mum, banker, psychiatrist, gardener, construction engineer and designer.

The RGS is always a fun place to spend the day, but it had an unusual and slightly surreal feel to it yesterday as there was a…

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The recent cold snap brought by northerly winds left the first frost across the south of England. The southern side of this chimney was sheltered from the wind and this is how it may have escaped a frost. It certainly had nothing to do with any heat from the chimney, no fire had been lit in it for the week before.

The other possibility is a gap in the roof’s insulation allowing more heat from the home to escape. Judging from the second frost-free patch on the right, it looks like it might be time to crawl around in the attic. Unfortunately we are battling with cluster flies up there at the moment so it is not a fun place to be. Must be a wind shadow in both cases. Definitely.

Taking a short break from final edits and unsubtle plugs for my book… I ventured into the garden. Something moved where there should have been no movement. My eyes focused through a wire fence to our algae and moss peppered greenhouse. The chickens were up to something. They had somehow (they have clipped wings, a mystery) got up onto the shelf where I was in the final stages of drying this season’s chilli crop on the vine and, well, gone mental. Clearly enraged that they were not able to eat the chillis themselves, they had ransacked the place, overturned the pots and then stumbled across my beautiful little citrus and kiwi plants. My lemons, oranges, kiwis and passion fruit saplings, all grown from supermarket-bought fruit seeds. Planted with my son in the kitchen in spring. The little ******* had stripped all the ones they could reach bare. They cannot…

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A tiny piece about ‘Les Ecrehous’ islands, that I had written for the Guardian ages ago, featured in it last Saturday. Here it is:

This year I was lucky enough to spend some time on a place called Les Écréhous. It is a place you spend time on, not in. Five miles northeast of Jersey, these three tiny islands stand precariously above the water at high tide, surrounded by rocks that have claimed countless lives in the past. When the tide recedes the dots in the sea join up, forming the most rugged landscape of sharp dark shapes, broken only by a few curves of sand. At low tide it is possible to walk for half an hour over land that spends most of its time deep underwater.
It is the ultimate coastal experience, filled with rich evidence of life – we found baby cuttlefish squirting ink in…

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First thing this morning our bathroom was bright with diffused light from the blinds that had been filled with moonlight from the west. I put on a thick jacket and pair of Ugg boots and wandered outside. Looking up I was spoilt. The moon was indeed throwing her weight around and this can sometimes make for imperfect stargazing, but the cold air was clear enough that between the first glow of dawn in the east and the moon’s light in the west there were riches to choose from. Gemini, Leo and Virgo were high in the sky. The dark spaces between them were punctured with Saturn and the reddish Mars. In the east another tinge of red was clear in the form of Arcturus. (It was less than two months ago that I was wondering at Arcturus and Bootes in the western evening sky.) Low in the southern sky…

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