For the love of God, spare us from any more blog titles like that, you are thinking. But persevere, there is a point to it. Somewhere.

I have just spent a fun 24 hours near Abergavenny, on Sugar Loaf Mountain (to give the big hill it’s superior title). I was joining some of the BBC Wales team.

The day reminded me just how easy it is to avoid the crowds. If work and other more important things allow, then the start and end of the day are the times to be on mountains, up to a certain altitude anyway. I can remember cuddling a friend in the lee of an igneous rock outcrop a few hundred feet below the summit of Mt Rinjani in Lombok, Indonesia. Not a twin bedroom, I hasten to add. We shivered violently in wet clothes praying that the dawn’s sun would get to our bones before hypothermia rattled them to pieces. In the UK this is not such a problem as you can often get to a summit close enough to sunrise to have it all to yourself, having had a cooked breakfast in a B&B the same day.

Between 10am and 6pm on Sugar Loaf, there were mothers with baby-carriers, curious men in more curious outdoor clothes and even some ordinary-looking hikers sharing the peak. But at 9am and 7pm the summit of Sugar Loaf mountain was wild and barren. And, yes, I do mean unable to produce babies.

If there was a point to this blog posting then that was it. The bit about times, not the bit about babies. It is now time for a no-holds-barred red-herring-ramble…

Both my cameras are on the blink. The Canon digital SLR drowned in Dartmoor last week and is in for repair. The Panasonic Lumix got two grains of sand in it on a windy West Wittering beach and died. (The second Lumix to die that way in under a year – nice lenses but if the shutter is allergic to beaches in anything stronger than a light breeze then, I have reluctantly concluded, the Lumix is not the camera for me.)

I was secretly glad that I had no camera on a mountain for a change, it made me feel naked. Except when helping to lug a 7kg one or its tripod. But it did mean that I had no pretty photos to tart up this unkempt blog post. I decided to try Google Images, to see if there was a publicly available one. Perhaps a nice tourist office one for ‘borrowing’. I did find one, the one above, and I checked which website it was on. Any scruples or fears that I may have harboured about infringing others’ copyright evaporated when I realised, with a neat measure of pleasant shock, that it was my own photo. I now remember taking the above picture of the Sugar Loaf mountain from its bigger sisters, The Black Mountains, one year ago almost to the day and publishing it on this website.

There is definitely a point, and possibly even a moral to all that, but I’ve had too much fresh air to find it and you’ve probably had too much blog post to care now anyway, so I’m going to follow my own advice and climb the small mountain that are the stairs up to my bedroom. Good night.

Last night, shortly after 10.30, I took this photograph of the moon rising above the woods and emerging from behind thin clouds. It looks very much like a full moon, but is actually one day after full, a waning moon. It does highlight the difficulty of judging the phase of the moon accurately.

From an aesthetic perspective there is no need to be able to judge the moon’s phase, but if you are trying to use the ‘phase method’ of finding direction from the moon then it is vital. I go into a lot of detail of this method in the book, because it is very satisfying but no less challenging. In a nutshell, you can work out direction from the moon if you understand where it is in its cycle relative to the sun (its phase). In the simplest possible example of this method, a full moon is opposite the sun, so if the sun is setting then the full moon will be rising and vice versa. But it gets so much more challenging, interesting and fun at every other stage!

Yesterday I gave my Beginner’s Guide to Natural Navigation course for another wonderfully diverse gang. A smattering of walkers, pilots and sailors, but among them a filmmaker, mum, banker, psychiatrist, gardener, construction engineer and designer.

The RGS is always a fun place to spend the day, but it had an unusual and slightly surreal feel to it yesterday as there was a conference going on for professional helicopter medics. The Hall was filled with people demonstrating amazing bits of equipment for patching people up. It all looked and sounded very high tech. Balloons inflating as expensive looking displays showed graphs and lines going up and down. Even a machine that quietly went ‘ping’.

Twenty-one of us headed out on a glorious circuit from the ‘Sussex Ox’ pub in Milton Street, near Eastbourne. We headed up Wilmington Hill and stopped along the way to look very briefly into the use of the sun, wind, clouds, land, sea, trees and buildings. One of the great things about natural navigation is that it never gets between a walker and the outdoor experience,  it never detracts from fantastic views or great dollops of sunshine, but helps us to connect with them in a new way.

Ideal for those who like their walking to come with a sense of reflection or an insight into nature.

All sorts! Those who enjoy fresh air and have an open mind. So far there have been artists, soldiers, writers, walkers, Navy officers, drainage engineers, lawyers, physicists, ecologists, accountants, marketing people, IT people, financiers, an RAF Navigator, fathers, mothers, daughters, sons, farmers, pilots, actors, sailors, builders, midwives… No astronauts yet, but it’s still early days.

Blue water sailors are aware that birds can be used in finding land, but walkers tend to overlook one of the simplest of navigational clues. The more friendly the birds, the closer you are to civilization. It’s not just birds either, town foxes are becoming positively insolent.