No, it is because in the spring of 2008 I was busy trying to work out whether there was any point in trying to make a living by teaching natural navigation, or not. Whether, perhaps, that was the stupidest idea I had ever had, a competition with some depth in the field. The problem was that there was no ‘sensible’ way of deciding whether to go ahead with it or not. There was no point bouncing the idea off family, bank managers, priests or ouija boards. The answers that would come back would just be different flavours of, ‘Mmmmmm….’.

The decision was made when I asked a professional pilot friend of mine a couple of questions.

‘Jim, bear with me here.’

‘OK, mate.’

‘Jim, where does the sun rise each day?’

‘In the east.’

‘Yes. Now, Jim, tell me everything you know about where the sun rises each day.’

There was a short pause.

‘I just did, mate.’

At that point the decision was made. Somebody needed to get evangelical about this subject, whether it was sensible to do so or not, and that somebody might as well be me. I registered the domain name, naturalnavigator.com, that evening.

To this day I get great pleasure whenever someone thanks me for helping them reconnect with the sun as it rises and sets each day. At the end of one course, a man in his late seventies, who had seen an awful lot of the world in his time, approached me. He said, out of earshot of the others,

‘I’m so glad I didn’t see out this fair innings of mine without working out where the sun rises each day!’

That moment alone made the whole endeavour worthwhile. I am very grateful that there have been quite a few others.

There is a website that can help in this quest to reconnect with the sun. It is rather beautiful in its simplicity. It allows you to work out the sunrise and sunset direction from anywhere on Earth at any time of the year. I love it. Here it is:

http://suncalc.net

Looking at a website is not the same as feeling the rays on your face. But it does allow you to travel the world over the course of the year, all before a cup of tea has run dry, which holds its own small magic.

The question is, is this a coincidence or the cause?

Please could anyone pass on any observations they have of leaning telegraph poles and together we may be able to forge a new technique.

An excerpt from his account of his travels is a good reminder of how much better connected the travellers of old were to the incestuous relationship between the sun, time and direction.

We hurried into the town where we were to change
horses, but our haste was fruitless. There we were obliged to wait
until our baggage came up long, long after us, and until it was
adjusted upon fresh cattle. If we now had galloped all the way to
Lhasa the sun would have been in the south before we could have
been in the august presence of the Tagin. This was exceeding
discomfort to my Munshi, but great comfort to me. I much dis-
liked the idea of hurrying to Lhasa, and without any kind of
refreshment going before the mandarins, sweltering and heated, my
boots hurting me every step I set; and I could not comprehend
what crime it was for travellers like us who could not command
prompt attendance, arriving an hour sooner or an hour later.

The heat seems to have abated a little, but the sun has left its great big footprints all over the countryside. The baked earth is cracked and fissures run along paths and the edges of the fields, more on the northern side than the southern.

The grass of our garden lawn is doing its best to betray both the sun’s arc and the motion of the trees’ shadows during the course of the day. The lawn is a patchwork of varying shades of green and brown, but it is not random and tells a story of heat and shade that is rooted in the direction of the sun.

It shows quite beautifully how counterintuitive it can be over the surface of a sphere. Who would have thought that the direction of Mecca, in Saudi Arabia, from New York is northeast? This is due to the fact that the direction is calculated using the shortest route and this is what is known as a great circle route. If you want to get from A to B across the surface of a sphere then the most direct route will always be a part of a circle which if continued would wrap itself all the way round the Earth, in a full circuference of the planet, and return to exactly the same point as you started at – a great circle. (This is the reason that airline route maps show routes that curve up towards the north pole in the northern hemisphere and down towards the south pole in the southern.)

The other thing that this map shows that is logical, but also quite strange to think about is that there is a point in the Pacific, on the opposite side of the Earth from Mecca, where it does not matter which way you face, you will always be facing towards Mecca. This is an identical concept to the idea of all directions being south from the North Pole, just a bit quirkier. You can imagine quite a heated debate on a ship at that point in the Pacific as the Muslim crew get out their prayer mats on the deck of the ship!

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.

Secondly, I’ve been out of touch longer than hoped for as I’ve been travelling in some nearby, but strangely wild places recently with limited options for internet access, including deepest darkest Brittany and a hut on some rocks in the Channel Islands called Les Ecrehou . Back soon and normal service will resume hopefully!

I took this picture a week ago. It shows the lower fair-weather cumulus clouds against the upper cirrus clouds. It is not at all unusual to watch the lower clouds and upper clouds move in different directions and to feel a third wind direction on your face at the same time.