I’ve always been fascinated with survival skills. From an early age I’ve loved the outdoors and the thought of having to survive on my wits and whatever natural resources are available. I’ve got a copy of the SAS Survival Handbook, I’ve spent many a night camping in the wilds of Scotland, can light a fire in a variety of different ways and reckon I’d do pretty well if I found myself in stuck in the middle of nowhere and had to survive (it’s not really optional to be fair). But if I could choose someone to be stuck with to increase our collective chance of survival and not turn it into an ordeal, then who would I want with me?

The way I see it, there are two choices. Ray Mears or Bear Grylls:

Both of these gentlemen have popular TV series that show you how to survive in the wilds of far flung corners of the world. They show you how to navigate without a compass, how to find food where none seems available, how to light a fire, where to get fresh water, how to build a shelter and survive the night and pretty much all you need to know. The difference between them however is in the delivery style. These guys are polar opposites.

The Men

Ray Mears is a mellow, laid back sort of a guy. He’s from the south of England and grew up exploring the countryside where he learned an appreciation of his surroundings and wildlife. He’s a worldwide expert in bush-craft having spent most of his life learning his craft, has travelled the globe and even runs his own school where you too can learn from his vast experience. His programmes are always interesting and filled with the stories of the people whose skills he demonstrates and are always set to a relaxed and easy tone.

Bear Grylls on the other hand is a former soldier who spent 3 years serving with the SAS. He’s an expert climber and sky diver and has partaken in a string of extreme sports. Following a free fall accident when in the army he broke his back in 3 places and spent a long time recovering fearing he may never walk or climb again. However at the tender age of only 23 he became the youngest person to successfully climb Mount Everest. He’s been on numerous expeditions pushing the limits of human endurance and has starred in several TV shows pitting him against survival situations. I’m assured by my good lady that he’s a rather good looking guy too!

The TV Programmes

One of Ray Mears shows is quite relaxing to watch. The music in the background will tend to be of the chilled out acoustic guitar variety. He’ll find himself out in the woods somewhere, or the outback or some similar absolutely-miles-from-anywhere situation. He’ll take a bit of time to show you some of the local plant life, what you can eat and what you can put in soup. He’ll spend a while making a shelter - but it’ll be so well put together that it would look like a home from home. He’ll show you a neat way to start a fire then he’ll head out and get dinner.

To give an example from a recent show he caught a salmon. He then showed you how to fillet it, got some wood and made a smoking stand, spread the salmon meat out over it then rested it above the fire - slow fade out with acoustic guitar music. Fade back in to show Ray taking the cooked fish out from the fire - music fades out. He took a bite out of the salmon and clearly it was delicious. So delicious that he passed some to the camera man to eat. He then relaxed in his shelter, put his feet up and the camera panned around to show the beautiful scenery while he told a story of some survivors who’d been stuck there in years gone by. You’d give anything to swap places with him.

Bear Grylls takes a different approach in his shows. Firstly, he’ll be on a helicopter or a plane explaining that he was about to show you what it’s like to be a tourist stuck in some remote part of Mexico (for example). He’ll jump out out of the helicopter / plane and sky dive his way to the ground. From then on he’ll be going flat out in an adrenaline packed hour that’ll leave you exhausted just watching! It’s all about getting out as soon as possible and doing anything to survive. If he’s high up he’ll try to find the most direct way down (usually a cliff) and scramble his way down. There’s a huge waterfall? No problem - he’ll just leap off the top! Feeling hungry and need some energy? He’ll eat anything! From camel testicles to live scorpions (quite crunchy and taste like rotten cheese apparently) to various grubs he’ll describe as “like a small packet of puss”. You never see him enjoying a meal - he’s usually trying not to vomit.

In one memorable episode Bear actually caught himself a trout (that’s a very tasty freshwater fish). Now trout are delicious but rather than do the Ray Mears thing of cooking it he simply gutted it, washed it in the river and started eating it raw there and then. There ain’t no time to cook! Stuck on the wrong side of a Siberian river? Easy, just strip off, throw your kit over and dive in! Bear’s shows are great and you know that if you were in a tight situation with him, even including hostile people around trying to kill you, it’d be a safe bet he’d get you out alive. But after watching an episode my brother said he’d “hate to be the camera crew” because it would be completely knackering trying to keep up - he’s a machine!

Who To Choose?

So in a choice of which one of these guys you’d be stuck with, I guess it comes down to what sort of experience you want. With Ray you know there wouldn’t be any rush. You’d be chilled, calm and relaxed. You’d have plenty of time to watch sunsets, think about life and learn a thing or two about the world around you and how to survive in it. Even though there wouldn’t be any music, you’d swear that someone in the background was twanging an acoustic guitar…

But find yourself in a survival situation with Bear and prepare to be tested to the limits! The only time you get to lie down and rest is if you’re dead! You wouldn’t have time to think as you’d be battling to keep up with Bear as he bounds up a cliff face or a tree or over a river. At least you won’t have time to miss home or wonder how you found yourself in this mess - you’ll be completely single minded about getting out of there. While one version of yourself in style on gourmet cooked food with Ray Mears, the other is scraping the bark off a tree looking for grubs to eat or wrestling a stag to the ground to make it’s fur into a hang-glider. (Note: when it comes to wrestling stags, you’re probably best leaving Mr Grylls to that one).

So I think it comes down to a relaxing holiday or a flat out race-against-the-clock-once-in-a-lifetime endurance event. I’m still not sure so I’m thinking…

The TV Series Pitch (to be read in a husky voice)

Two men. Both expert survivors. Both at home in any environment, friendly or hostile. Both with the same equipment. Both with the same goal - stay alive and get home. Each will have a camera crew to track their progress. Watch the split-screen action and press your red button to go interactive and choose different camera angles, see action-replays of life-or-death situations and vote for your winner. Who will get out first? Who will lose the most weight? Whose clothes will be the most tattered and mud stained?

So how about it BBC? Does the show get commissioned? Come on - if you don’t do it, Discovery or somebody else will! Since I came up with the idea I’ll want Executive Producer credits…

Playing quite a lot of football as I do I’m forever picking up knocks, bruises and strains. I don’t mind really as that’s part of the fun, although I’m sure some people think I suffer from spousal abuse with all the bruises I get!

Anyway, my ankles seem to take more of a battering than anything else - I guess when you mis-time a tackle and get the man instead of the ball it’s their ankle that you’re most likely to tread on. Sometimes I’d have to strap up my ankle for the next few times games and sometimes I’d have to miss games altogether until it got better. But then a friend of mine gave me some great advice about dealing with ankle injuries - although he warned me that it’s a bit painful. Since it’s been such a successful treatment for me I thought I’d mention it here in case you’ve hurt your ankle stepping off a pavement / playing football / mud wrestling / Scots country dancing / doing some other activity.

So, here’s how to get a speedy recovery from an ankle strain or mild sprain. I like to call it the “Ice Bucket Treatment”:

1. Fill up a bucket or basin with cold water and as much ice as you can get your hands on.
2. Get yourself a towel (handy for all occasions).
3. Plunge your foot into the bucket until it goes numb (this should take a few minutes and you’ll know when it is because the agonising pain will have stopped - see right).
4. Take your foot out, dry it and wait for it to warm up again.
5. Repeat from step 3 several times until the ice has pretty much melted.

If you do this for a few nights after your injury you’ll be surprised how much more quickly it recovers than if you just left it alone.

One thing to warn you of is that step 3 really is surprisingly painful. My good lady made the mistake of telling me she’d hurt her ankle and having laughed at my suffering many times doing the ice bucket treatment I suggested she give it a try. The first thing she did after putting her foot in the bucket was to take it out again followed by uttering an expletive about how cold it was. I told her to put it back in and keep it there until it went numb - which she duly did. However the poor thing had tears streaming down her face from the pain as she did it so in the end we agreed that maybe the ice bucket treatment wasn’t for her. She doesn’t find it as amusing when I do it now so it wasn’t a total loss!

Ice baths are commonly used by professional athletes after training sessions and games / races to good effect but I don’t fancy filling up a wheelie bin with water and ice after every game thank you very much - however don’t let that stop you if you have your own ice machine!

I’ve mentioned before that I play football for a team sponsored by my (former) employer. We won the league cup the other year and I still count that as one of my fondest sporting memories. We finished mid-table last season despite stringing together some very good performances (including being the only team to beat the league champions).

It’s a Summer league and this Winter we joined a 5-a-side league with most of the same teams in it. A couple of guys from another team joined us and it was really good fun. We couldn’t get a team out for a couple of games at the start and dropped points straight away but after then we managed to get it together and we were very tough to beat. In fact the two games we did lose were as a result of key players not being available (due to illness and injury) and not being able to replace them with like-for-likes.

In the end we couldn’t catch the runaway league leaders and finished second but what I did learn was that having a settled squad - just like in any game of football from amateur to professional - brings consistent results. When playing with the same people each game everybody knows when to attack, when to defend, what position to go into under each circumstance and where each person will make their runs. It’s almost like telepathy and the game seems easy. But take one or two players out and suddenly it doesn’t click any more and winning gets harder.

When I was at school and University I used to play individual sports like tennis, squash, swimming, running and biking and really enjoyed them. But what I love about team sports like football is if you don’t play as a team you don’t win. It’s not about individual skill and one person scoring and winning the game single-handed - it’s about everybody contributing and working for the team so that that person can get the ball in the right place at the right time to score the goal. If one person doesn’t put the work in then everybody suffers.

For example, I very rarely score more than the odd goal - in fact I scored exactly one goal in every game we won - so you can’t rely on me to score enough goals to win a game. However I’m not bad at making passes that can cut through a team and give someone who can score lots of goals a chance. Also I’m not bad at tackling and winning the ball, but I’m not great either so you can’t rely on me to win the ball all the time. But that’s ok as long as we have someone else who can play that part (which we do). And so on. Together we make a team and cover all bases but if one of us takes our foot off the accelerator then the whole thing breaks down. If we don’t win the ball, don’t pass it into space and don’t get someone on the end of it who can score, then we don’t do well (to simplify things somewhat).

The great thing is when everybody plays for each other, the team clicks and there’s no better feeling than going off the pitch at the end of the game having won a tough match - it’s one for all and all for one (sorry, that line probably set off your cliché detector). As I get older I have to do quite a bit of training and flexibility work to stop my knees from falling apart and continue playing at a decent level - but it’s no hardship since playing in a team with quality players against good opposition is great fun. I’ll enjoy it while it (and my body) lasts!

For a few years before I moved from Scotland down to Yorkshire I used to do a lot of swimming at the University of Dundee pool. Not just a few lengths followed by ages in the shower, but hours in the pool every day training with a variety of interesting characters from accountancy students (maybe it’s the monotony of counting strokes and lengths that attracted them) to a former representative of Scotland at the Commonwealth Games (who was an awesome athlete - I could write pages on his flawless butterfly technique) to a triathlete who competed in IronMan races (he was a scaffolder by trade, was built like a bodybuilder but had endurance like you couldn’t believe - which is essential for a 2.4 mile swim followed by 112 miles on a bike rounded off with a marathon).

Anyway, I used to train with these sorts of people, battling to keep up with them and their punishing sessions while acquiring quite a physique in the process (I’m sorry to disappoint you ladies out there but the v-shaped back, washboard abs and powerful shoulders are no longer quite there). The irony was that I learned to swim late preferring to burst into tears as a small child when presented with water like the wuss that I was. What I realised when I was 21 was that if my parents had been the pushy sort that pushed their kids into sport, I might have actually made a decent competitive swimmer. Ah well, I can always dream!

Right, I’m digressing somewhat (rambling comes with the territory when I take trips down Memory Lane). So I’d walk out of the pool from a tough session and my arms would feel like they’re about to fall out, my legs would feel like jelly and the goggle marks around my eyes would make me look like I was wearing eye liner. I was ravenously hungry. At the time I wasn’t drinking alcohol, was eating wisely, steering clear of junk food and high fat stuff, generally looking after myself. Except for one vice I allowed myself. Full sized trifles.

The saying “Never go shopping for food when you’re hungry” is spot on as if I went to the supermarket after a workout I’d inevitably come back with a family sized trifle. I’d remove the lid, get a dessert spoon out from a drawer and devour the whole thing (which would normally feed 4) in a matter of minutes.

Digression Number 2: I was at a party once where I’d just finished explaining this piece of gluttony to the hostess who said “I’ve got a trifle in the fridge, I don’t believe you could just eat the whole thing like that”. Cut to 10 minutes later and a horrified expression on her face when I’d done exactly that!

The way I figured it, since I was burning thousands of calories per day and was eating very healthily in general, I could get away with such a high concentration of Trifles Per Week (or TPW) and indeed I suffered no ill effects. Sadly when I moved to Yorkshire I couldn’t find anybody to train with who was at the level I was at so I eventually hung up my trunks and moved onto other things. And curiously, my obsession with trifles went too. I’m not sure whether it was the chlorine or the tight-fitting trunks, but as soon as I was no longer exposed to that lifestyle my desire to gorge myself on trifles disappeared.

It’s a shame really as I’d become quite an expert on trifles having eaten so many varieties (things like varying the ratio of sponge thickness to custard to cream can make all the difference in advanced trifle design and manufacture). Strangely I’ve managed to replace the swimming / trifle combination with a similar football / tiffin obsession so I suspect that different sports have different complementary foods that you (or strange people like me) crave. I may have to do some experiments to find out - huge waistline here I come…

As a young lad my dad would drag me out walking and when I was tired, or I'd stubbed my toe, or I'd skinned my knee, or I'd tripped up and fallen on my face, or anything that generally hurt he'd comfort me by saying "pain proves you're alive son!". I used to find that no comfort at all of course because I was quite the wuss when I was a kid. When you're young and something hurts, you stop doing it. There's no concept of pushing through the pain barrier, you just burst into tears and wait for mummy to come to the rescue.

But when I got older I found that pain is really just a state of mind. One thing I learned with the Marines was that even when you're absolutely knackered and feel like you're going to collapse in heap on the ground, if you put your mind to it you can keep going well past what you thought your limits were. Once you've pushed yourself beyond your perceived limits you realise you can do it again whenever you want to.

The trouble is I'm one of these people who likes pushing myself for the sense of achievement afterwards. It's one of the reasons I like climbing mountains, mountain biking and running. If something is easy it just doesn't seem as worthwhile to me when I've done it. And when I look back at all the things I remember that I'm proud of, most are the ones where I've had to graft and dig deep. For me it's not a competition against anyone else - plenty of people climb more mountains in a much more hardcore way than me, loads of people are faster and more crazy on a mountain bike than me and a boatload of people are faster runners than me. But that doesn't matter, it's just me pushing myself - me against my will.

Over the last couple of years I've been doing these sorts of things less and less and it's only since I started hiking again that I've remembered the sense of achievement I get from pushing my body and keeping going when I'm knackered and just want to stop. My good lady isn't like that at all and can't understand why I actually like making myself suffer. I guess our brains are just wired up differently. I always like to jest that "I'm the risk taker, she's the home-maker"!

I just think that a life without ever taking any risks, without pushing yourself is a life without highlights. I wouldn't want to look back on my life from my deathbed and think of all the hours I spent watching Eastenders and sitting in the comfort zone while the world outside the door passed me by. In the words of the great 20th century philosopher Ferris Bueller: "Life goes by pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it".

Those good people at Moo have come up with another cool way to enjoy your photographs. They started with MiniCards (some of mine are pictured right) which are half-sized business cards that you can decorate with your own pictures (whether they be from Flickr or elsewhere). You can put what you like on the back of them and they’re the sort of thing you can give out at parties or just randomly show off to people. Very nice.

So as soon as I heard they’d come up with moo StickerBooks I went straight to the site and ordered myself some. I had no idea what I’d do with them but the good thing about stickers is that you can stick them to virtually anything! Here’s what they look like:

They come on little tear-out pages with 6 to a page and the book contains 90 stickers in total. You can choose as few or as many different photos as you like. For a fiver per book they’re a bargain so I got 2 to get me started! As usual with moo the quality is excellent and I’m looking around the office at the moment for things to stick them to. Expect to see a moo sticker stuck on something near you soon!