The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

It has been an interesting few days. I spent yesterday in the South Downs with Michelle Kosinski and the crew from America’s NBC network.

Whilst it’s fun and helpful to be able to do the odd high profile thing, like TV or radio, what is more exciting for the long term is the way the grass-roots network is building around this unusual subject.

There is little that I love more than being made aware of one of the many natural navigation clues that have so far escaped my notice. I like to say towards the end of all my talks or courses, ‘You have unwittingly signed up to be part of my extended research team.’ I mean it half-jokingly and half-seriously, as I’m very aware that I can never see as much of the world as those who I meet can as a group.

Every time someone brings a…

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Russ Altendorff came on a course in the hills yesterday. He is a keen sailor, electronics guru and author of a popular blog on the more technological side of marine navigation. During our afternoon we locked horns with topics that ranged from the desert to the ocean and back to a southern England that was experiencing hail, horizontal rain and even the odd sunbeam. We also discussed ‘confirmation bias‘, or the tendency to make your observations fit your preferred hypothesis. Natural navigation is particularly susceptible to this, nature is rarely absolute and is so often open to interpretation. On a cold wet day it is even more likely that you are going to want the evidence to fit your theories.

At the end of the afternoon the sun was down, the moon and Jupiter were high in the southern sky, and it was time for Russ to take…

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I went for a walk with Matt Baker and the ‘Open Country’ team from Radio 4 a few weeks ago. It was broadcast a couple of days ago but you can still listen to the programme, ‘Sussex Visions‘, using BBC iPlayer. We chat about flowers and the Tuareg and one or two other things.

There is a fly buzzing around me at the moment that is seriously dopey, it seems to me that its best days might be behind it. It keeps landing on my hand or face and lingering for a dangerously long time, like its will to live has evaporated.

This reminded me of my trip to the Sahara last month. All signs of life in a desert are interesting at some level, usually including some navigation clues. Flies were no exception. They were not a big problem, and we could go for several hours without noticing them, but then they would appear in a swarm business (I just Googled the collective noun for flies and apparently it is either ‘swarm’ or ‘business’. I love the latter.)

Sometimes their appearance was easy to understand, if we were closing in on an oasis or wadi with some vegetation. These were…

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One of the things that I love about running my courses is that I’m guaranteed to learn something too, but because of the diverse backgrounds of those that attend I can never guess what area it will be in. Over the past few courses I have learnt something about drumlins, Foucault’s pendulum, moles and sewage smells. This is a subject that is wonderfully difficult to pigeonhole, which reminds me…

The Geographical magazine asked me today whether I considered myself a geographer.

I gave the following, slightly long-winded answer:

‘Am I a geographer? Good question, but no short answer I’m afraid. My niche has a lot of geography in it, but is probably not part of what the academic geographical world would consider its domain. Natural navigation sits astride many fields including geography, meteorology, natural science and astronomy, to name a few.

However, my recent trip to Libya…

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