Come on, light my fire

Ah, the joys of bashing out a bannock... time was when the old country skills were passed on from father to son - but the modern dad takes his boy to bushcraft lessons in Sussex

We're not the kind of family you read about in the papers, lazing about watching TV and dragging Britain's obesity levels towards those enjoyed in the lardier parts of America. Our children sometimes play outside when they're not destroying their minds with computer games; I have been known to pant round the gym; my wife likes to keep herself trim by picking up pyjamas.

On the other hand, for people who live in leafy East Herts, we're not exactly what you'd call 'active', especially at this time of the year. There may be mighty oaks and rolling fields outside our window, but we get most of our fresh air walking to and from the car. We don't own Barbour jackets, stout boots and gnarled sticks. We don't have a dog with badger scars. If I've got any rambling to do, I do it in my sleep when I get back from a hard day at the pub on Friday night.

Like most people with urban hankerings, my idea of the countryside is a nice bit of greenery, a babbling brook, a haywain or two, an idiot on a stile and a five-star hotel just over that hill. Any sort of wildness makes me think of bears and quicksand. I'm not an instinctive camper. I can't tie knots or skin a rabbit or make needles out of fish bones. I'm wary of all known tools. In one of those disaster movies where the plane crashes in the Himalayas, I would be cast as the squawking coward who won't eat the bat soup and falls into the bottomless ravine at the end of the first reel.

But does it have to be like this?

Apparently not. John Rhyder, an expert on the great outdoors, runs courses for people like me and the man in the ravine - not to mention our couch-potato offspring. It's John's mission in life to reintroduce Homo ineptus to his native habitat, to demystify nature with the use of basic knowledge and skills, to light the forest path with his patient wisdom. If anyone can help me discover my inner Walton, this is surely the man.

I duly arrive in darkest Sussex to meet up for a day's taster session. 'Bushcraft', it's called. I have brought my eldest mancub, Baxter, 14, to bond with (or to have an argument with once he finds out that I have lied about the chainsaws). John is looking the part in what I'd like to think is a proper woodman's baseball cap and a sawdusty lumberjack jacket in faded woody colours. I am resplendent in a borrowed deluxe yellow stormcoat of the type that opens up into a four-man mountain tent with distress flares and well-stocked minibar at the pull of a cord.

Off we tramp into the woods.

John asks if we have any special interests. 'Skateboarding?' Baxter suggests. I step in with the slightly more germane announcement that I have been watching Ray Mears's survival programmes on TV. Hmm. John used to work with Mears, but now feels the whole survival thing has been overdone; that it is too forbidding for a lot of people - too reliant on maggot-eating and not enough emphasis on enjoyment. This much we can agree on. I'm very much in favour of enjoyment, especially when it's raining, which I can't help noticing it now is. Still, not to worry - our camp is just round the next corner and there's a big parachute to keep the weather out, stumps to sit on and a cheerful fire blazing. Caron, John's wife and office manager, is here to make hot drinks and hand out biscuits while we get warm. How hard can this be?

John has decided we ought to learn how to build a fire of our own. To do that you need to cut 'feathersticks'. And to do that you have to learn how to use a knife without slicing through the big important artery in your leg. We watch very closely as he 'addresses' the wood just so. It would be a shame to bleed to death on our first day out. He leaves us to it.

I am slightly nervous of Baxter and knives. Up to now he has only ever used a knife to keep his fork company at the side of his plate while he eats with his fingers. Still, working together in loving harmony, we manage to saw a branch in half and then, amazingly, cut the branches lengthways into four simply by forcing the blade through the timber using another lump of wood as a mallet. This is pretty cool. Whittling away, I feel like Davy Crockett already, or at least one of the Beverly Hillbillies. Now, having got our sticks, it is just a small matter of making shavings that curl back on themselves without falling off. This is slightly impossible but we do end up with a collection of sticks that are not entirely bald and therefore theoretically combustible.

'That's really good,' John says. He sends us out to find birch bark and honeysuckle or other fibrous creeperish growth to make our tinder bundles. All you have to do is rub this stuff together until, magically, you have what looks like a lovely handful of dry straw. After a few minutes' rubbing, my hands are pretty much empty, though I notice there is an impressive pile of dust on the ground.

As with most bushcraft skills, there's a knack to this. A successful tinder bundle should look like a dense bird's nest with fluffy material at its centre - you can make the fluffy bit from the cat's tails on bullrushes or from thistle gorse, John says, showing us some he prepared earlier. Once you've got this far, all you need to do is light it. John goes through the various methods - matches, a battery-and-wire-wool ensemble, two household chemicals which when folded into a wad of the Daily Mirror burst magically into flames. Or you can rub two sticks together. Ah, now you're talking...

But first, lunch. I can't believe it's half-past two. Caron has cooked up some delicious things with sheep's cheese and veggie things on skewers. I ask where she foraged for the mushrooms, which are very good. 'Sainsbury's,' she says. It's not really the season for foraging, John says. He is busy bashing out dough for 'bannock', a sort of bread made from flour, milk powder, water, a touch of baking powder, a pinch of salt and... sundried tomatoes? 'You could put anything into this,' he says, 'fruit, nuts, berries, bits of dried meat...' He divides it into rolls, which he then fries in a pan over the fire. Yum.

Sitting round munching beneath the parachute, I ask whether those of a 'townie' disposition might generally struggle as kings of the wild frontier. To John this is crazy talk. 'This big division between town and country is pretty artificial,' he says. 'There's no mystery. You just need the skills and the time to practise them. I guarantee that after a few days or a week you'll feel it's no big deal - being outdoors, being in the dark, learning to make tools, light a fire, build a shelter. Nobody's rushing home at the end of these courses. People come back to improve their skills and learn more.'

His brochure outlines a dozen or more courses, from family-friendly campcraft and tracking animals to grown-up pioneering stuff like axemanship and navigation. One minute you're rustling about nervously in your first pair of waterproof trousers, the next you're utilising your rope skills to get your men across the swollen river after the Mexicans have dynamited the bridge and Ernest Borgnine has escaped with the gold.

Back to work. Using what bits of log and branches there are around, Baxter and I construct our fire-by-friction apparatus, cutting a short, flattish length of wood for a 'hearth', then a stake with one bluntish end and one sharp end, then a block of harder wood to hold the drill down and stop it flying off.

Oh, and a bow with a string that you have to tangle tight round the drill and pull vigorously back and forth, while bearing down with the block, the idea being to spin the drill against the hearth to produce a precious little burning coal, which is supposed to fall through the V-notch and onto the tip of the knife blade that with your third hand you have expertly slid underneath.

It's just the darnedest thing to keep the whole lot moving in an efficient manner, especially with Baxter giving me an earful for pushing when I should be pulling. There is smoke from time to time, but not, strictly speaking, fire. It takes practice, John observes, as the drill goes boomeranging off into the bushes for the seventh time.

Never mind. If it was easy, the monkeys would have got the hang of it and we'd be the ones swinging from trees and eating each other's fleas. Undeterred by failure (mainly because he thinks it's my fault), Baxter goes to work on an alternative method - trying to get sparks to land on a piece of inflammable fungi by rubbing the back of his knife blade on an iron bar.

Three weeks later (in wolf years) we finally see signs of smouldering. He quickly inserts the tiny ember into our tinder bundle and starts blowing gently, feeding the glow by pressing it in at the sides. He blows and blows. And blows. Just as the poor boy is on his last blow there's a puff of smoke and the whole lot erupts into joyful flames of triumph. Hurray!

There's just enough day left to take a walk round the lake. John points out medicinal herbs and things that are good to eat if you're starving to death - plants, hazelnuts, fresh water squeezed from sphagnum moss, natural aspirin from goat willow. Then it's time to go.

It's a pity we didn't get round to making string out of stinging nettles with our bare hands. Maybe next time. But for now, it's back to the man village. Preferably one with a Pizza Hut, says Baxter.

· For details of courses ring Woodcraft on 01730 816299 or visit

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