“I recently bought a copy of your book and loved it – quite remarkable! My brother has stolen it from me yesterday – he’s a Qantas Pilot so I’m guessing it’s somewhere over the Pacific at the moment.”

A couple of days ago Sir Ranulph Fiennes – no stranger to fresh air projects! – described the The Natural Navigator as:

“The perfect book for getting you started on your own adventure.”

It is perhaps time for a minor celebration and what better way than with a picture of some of pale green lichens. During a long walk on La Palma in the Canaries, I came across this lava field where the black igneous rocks were covered in a thin carpet of lichen. The lichen had a strong preference for a northwest aspect. Later the same day, the sky filled with thick low clouds and these same lichens helped me find me my way back to civilisation. The first picture (top left) was taken looking southeast, the second picture was taken seconds later, looking northwest from exactly the same spot.

The book is still currently available from Waterstones and Foyles have a few copies left. It will hopefully be in your local independent shop too.

A big thank you to everyone who has bought a copy and left Amazon’s cupboards so bare!

At 2 o’ clock I am being interviewed by Adrian Phillips from Bradt Travel Guides at the Destinations Travel and Holiday Show in Birmingham.

Hope to see you there, or if you live a bit south of that (towards the midday sun) then perhaps at the Oxford Literary Festival on Wednesday 24th March? Or could it be that you like the taste of the Atlantic and can be found dreaming of Manderley, in which case I will look forward to our meeting at the Daphne du Maurier Festival on the 19th May.

More times and places – where I will be describing life without a copy of ‘The Natural Navigator’ book as being a meaningless wander – can be found here.

The morning shadow from the dormer window is retreating and the sun is reaching more of the roof with each minute. The frost from the night before is thawing in the warm light. It is also forming a very simple shadow compass. At this time of year the sun rises very close to east and the direction that the frost is retreating will be west to east. The protruding ‘nose’ of frost near the top of the roof can be joined to the jutting part of the shadow to form a near perfect west-east line.

This effect can be seen in so many places at this time of year, as we get closer to the spring equinox (20 March). It will also work close to the autumnal equinox (23 September this year), but not in summer or winter when the sun rises and sets a long way from east and west. At these times there are other, better things to look for.

This balance between the seasons, between light and dark and east and west is something the world shares at this time of year. It comes as the sun finishes its long stay over the southern hemisphere and gets ready to cross the equator, the equinox itself, and begin a six months tour over the northern hemisphere.  This time last year I happened to be checking that the sun was rising where it ought to be in Libya.

I arrived early to listen to some of the other speakers, including the National Geographic photographer, Frans Lanting. The speakers’ notes are very explicit about not running over your alotted time, but Frans was on a serious roll. That guy is not short of slides. It was enjoyable but as it shot past it’s slot, and then on some, enjoyable though it was I had to nip out. I’d inspected the schedule for the day and had a plan of sorts; listen to this talk, pop out for a bit to meet a friend, return for my talk at 3.30 etc.

In the nicest possible way it all went wrong. Outrageous name-dropping time…

In the speakers’ waiting room (called the ‘Green Room’ in a rather ‘Oprah’ way), I was helping myself to a juice when all the people at one of the tables stood up and left. All except one and there was a face I recognised from the back of many, many good books. Jan Morris was sat all on her own and I couldn’t resist, so sat down for a chat. We chatted for quite a while and all the time I was feeling quite surreal to be chatting to such a legend over their sandwich. I kept volunteering to leave her in peace, but she she insisted on chatting and I wasn’t about to say ‘no’. What a lovely person, everything she said was scintillating, in a very normal way.

Met some other interesting new and old names, renewed a couple of acquaintances and generally felt very inspired by the event. If you have considered travel writing or photography as a career then a visit is not just recommended, but something of a rite of passage I think. There is still one day left to go this year (today).

I landed back at Gatwick last night following an accidental visit to Tenerife.

The wind has been my friend on so many occasions recently, a dependable breeze helping me on my way through the woods or the clouds scudding overhead pointing the way home. It was probably time that it reminded me that it is not just in the business of helping me on my walks.

The plan was simple: I wanted to use a one week gap in the diary to get out to one of the wildest spots within five hours of home to do some natural navigation research. Days one to six went well as I walked, mainly without reference to map, compass or GPS (all were within reach), around the dramatic volcanic landscapes of La Palma in the Canary Islands. More details to follow here over the coming weeks, including photos of the incredible ‘Caldera de Taburiente‘.

Day 7 came and it was time to go home. Unfortunately the skies were in a real grump. I took this photo of a fearsome cumulonimbus cloud from La Palma airport about an hour before we were due to take off for Gatwick on Monday. The crosswinds reached 50 knots and our aircraft wasn’t able to get in to pick us up, it was forced to divert to Tenerife.

It felt like the air was trying to suck us all off the island and into a vortex. The sea near to the base of the cloud was being ripped at and whipped into whirls of spray and foam. (I thought it looked a bad place to go sailing and then remembered that I had sailed through that exact patch of water two years and two months earlier. I was fortunate that the weather was kinder on that occasion.)

A small delay became a big one. We all ended up waking at 3.30am on Wednesday morning to catch a ferry over to Tenerife to catch the same aircraft home from there.

I’ve got a letter apologising for the ‘46 hour 17 minute’ delay. It was worth it, as the photos will show.

Researchers from the IE University School of Biology in Santa Cruz, Spain, have found that the male bustards align themselves with the sun when trying to attract a female. Their white feathers, the bustard’s equivalent of an Armani suit/Ferrari/pair of Reeboks – delete as applicable, show up better when aligned to catch the sun’s rays. Dr Tommaso Pizzari, an ornithologist from Oxford University, observed that although it made the birds more vulnerable to predators, it certainly made them more visible to females. ‘That’s why we think these puzzling traits evolved and are specific to males.’

Although the bustards have been found to do this more dependably in the eastern morning sunlight, the human animal is more likely to be found trying the same tactics over a cocktail umbrella pointing towards the western sunset.

The BBC website has more, but then so does everything around us – there isn’t much nature without sex.

I adore the Witterings in winter, the barbecue and beach towels may have to stay at home but it is invigorating to get blown along on miles of abandoned sand. In between games of hide and seek amongst the beach huts, games of football on the sticky sand and races to pieces of seaweed, I noticed some interesting patterns in the sand.

This photo shows how there tend to be broad ripples parallel to the coastline itself, but closer inspection reveals more subtle patterns and these can be used to decipher the action of the water and therefore yield more clues to direction. The ripples of sand fan out over the small hills that are exposed at low water. There are tight-packed parallel ridges where the water action is uniform, but a more confused system of diamonds where incoming water meets the returning undercurrent from earlier waves. All of these patterns can be used by walkers in low visibility to orientate themselves, if the sound of the water is not helping, but they can also be used by divers searching for a clue to the direction of coast in low visiblity.

The picture was taken looking northeast. The very perceptive will have noticed that there are molehills in the foreground and that they are in the shaded ground, very possibly not a coincidence. Something I touch on in my book. Oh you tease, you!