Such a shame, it would have been an unusually good opportunity to catch them going to bed together. Fear not, I have a near foolproof plan for spotting them and shall report back with my results. If, over the next few days, you do catch a clear sky and setting sun, hold tight and wait for the two bright beacons that will follow the sun down.

There was a review of the book in Easter’s Sunday Telegraph.

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!

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 run home, cross-country in snow and as fast as I could, in order to get to them before they set off in a car that would have found the conditions even more lethal. I know the local country quite well, but had to take the most direct route home, something that I had not had to do from that area before. The sun was up and I made my way through woods and fields and over fences in a straight line home, obviously no map, compass or GPS involved. I got back just in time. The car was picked up later by a recovery garage, I have yet to hear whether it will drive again.

I was still keen to get a shot of the winter solstice sunrise, but without a car made a plan and laid out my clothes and boots last night. When I got up at 6am, the weather had deteriorated and cloud dominated. Still, it’s good to be alive at this moment that has been celebrated since prehistoric times!

We made our way out into the harbour and at times it was hard to hear each other speaking as the wind whistled past our ears. After an hour I decided that we ought to swallow our pride and return to the marina and postpone the trip to Cowes. The final straw was the fact that the engine was struggling to move the boat above 2 knots into wind, which did not bode well. The wind was from the west, the direction we wanted to head and it would have been a merciless and exhausting six hours of tacking at best, when the tide turned we would make no progress for our efforts either. None of my friends had ever sailed in those conditions before and I decided that it wasn’t the day to introduce them to such joys. It had the potential to go badly pear-shaped. Instead we moored up, swapped our soft-soled shoes for boots and headed off in the Land Rover for a very pleasant walk in the South Downs. We still got plenty of fresh air, just a little less brine in it than originally planned.

Someone mentioned that tennis courts have to be aligned a certain way to be LTA approved and so I thought I’d try to investigate this interesting notion. Google Earth shows the courts at Wimbledon to be aligned close to North/South, but with a definite northwest/southeast component. If anyone knows more about this then answers on a postcard – if you live in the nineteenth century – or email if you don’t, please.

The first half of the day was spent indoors studying the theory, looking at photographs and playing with celestial models. One of the points I am always keen to make is about the relationship between the uses of our senses and wayfinding. Sight is so often under-rated because its use is so immediately obvious, but we rarely acknowledge how much detail is allowed to escape. For example, we have evolved to identify things by shape much more readily than by colour or shade. Our brains tend to identify an object as a tree, ie. not a threat, and then move on to processing other information without noticing the subtle differences in shades of the leaves at all. Sometimes it pays to rein it in, to force it to focus and to analyse some of the other detail that is coming in through our eyes. It is only by slowing our thoughts that our brains can actually start to see some of the things that our eyes see.

However aware we become of this, some details will always escape our eyes and mind. That is why walking in a group can be so rewarding.

After lunch we set out into the South Downs. A couple of hours into the walk my eyes were drawn to a stout beech stump, its sawn trunk covered in a thick moss felt. Using my fingers and then a stick, I began peeling away the moss. I wanted to reveal the rings of the dead tree and use the position of its heart to indicate direction. Stephen, who was standing a few feet away, politely pointed out that there was a near identical tree stump less than twenty feet away with no moss covering its rings. I had let myself become so drawn into one object that I had lost the wider picture. I walked over to the stump and had a bit of a laugh at myself. I had managed to blind myself to the bigger picture by studying the finer detail. Nature was once again gently mocking and reminding of the need for balance in everything.