The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

For a short and strange time, the esoteric, romantic and mostly-undiscovered subject of natural navigation is about to shrug off its shyness and dive, screaming and giggling, into the mainstream.

On Wednesday 5th October at 8pm, All Roads Lead Home, will be on BBC2.

It is going to be a beautiful moment, except the bits I’m in, which will be a bit feral.

In the programme, Alison Steadman, Sue Perkins and Stephen Mangan learn the basics of natural navigation before being released into the wilds of Cornwall (Episode 1), Ireland and then Wales & Liverpool.

I will be posting more about the programme, including some info about the making of the series on this website over the coming weeks. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the programme.

You’ll love the telly, it’s like the newfangled internet but with good-quality large pictures that move and excellent…

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On Monday night I gave my lecture, ‘Travel and Exploration: a new direction?’ to the Royal Geographical Society. I really enjoyed it, but with about five hundred people in the audience it was fun in a pulse-quickening kind of way. It is time for a little confession.

Last Friday was a full moon and no ordinary full moon either. It was a perigee full moon, when the moon passes closest to the earth and appears a lot larger than normal. On Friday evening it was due to be the largest full moon that we had seen for 50 years. There were also due to be meteors from the Germinid showers.

I am not generally a hugely superstitious creature, although I do enjoy reading about the historical and cultural associations surrounding sky omens. At the end of last week it was easier for me to see how these connections and beliefs…

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Those who have been on a course will know the strange pleasure that I get from connecting seemingly unrelated things through natural navigation, so here, before your eyes I will attempt to connect a cat on a dustbin and a Greek orthodox priest.

The Gooleys have just returned from a week visiting family in the Peloponnese. My brother’s house is high in the Greek hills and we found ourselves following the same route down a few times each day on the way to towns, villages or the beach. It was during these trips in the car that I noticed that certain animals and indeed, in the case of one Greek orthodox priest, people appeared with a soothing predictability at certain points on the journey.

There was a corner that I remembered well for the dustbin which invariably had this cat sitting on it, and the turning to the…

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