.
leave for a week somewhere dry and warm)
a power drill with blunt drill tip
a ball of tinder; shredded paper/wool
Carve a small bowl-shaped dent into your yucca* and drill down into this until it begins to smoke. You need a blunt drill so that you don’t bore through the soft wood too quickly.
Once the friction creates enough heat for the yucca wood to start smoking – you’ll see it and smell it at the same time – keep going a little longer. Now whip the drill away and look for a tiny red-hot lump – or a’coal’. Very quickly, tip your coal into the tinder ball, blowing on it gently in the way you’ve seen on all those survival shows.
If you don’t succeed at first keep trying. Or use a match.
Now put up a few shelves – you may as well, now that you’ve got the drill out.
THE CEILING SUNDIAL
The ceiling sundial brings the intrigue of the celestial cycle, of solstices and seasons, into your bedroom, and it’s a pretty good way to tell if you’re late for work as well.
Lying in bed one morning looking at the lines of sunlight thrown across the ceiling by reflections from the car windscreen below, I invented the ceiling sundial. I really did, even though Sir Isaac Newton had done the same, 350 years earlier. Whether it’s the father of modern physics, you or me, it’s pretty obvious that an ability to tell the time by looking at your bedroom ceiling is a thing worth having.
All you need is a mirror positioned on your window ledge so that a spot of light is thrown onto your ceiling. This is the simplest form of sundial; it needs the least equipment, it’s fast to set up and, best of all, the space available on the ceiling allows for a bigger dial, giving extreme accuracy.
It only works if you have a south-facing bedroom, or at least a view of the southern sky from your room (anywhere between SW and SE facing is perfect).
As well as a south-facing room and available ceiling you need:
a small mirror
glue or tape
a pencil
a clock.
FIXING THE MIRROR
In the morning, fix the mirror to the window sill (or a sash halfway up) so that it reflects a spot of light onto the ceiling. Position the mirror horizontally, as high (close to the ceiling) as you can get it.* Now follow the progress of the spot and mark its position every hour with a pencil.
Well done, you now have your very own spot dial, or at least the makings of one. The dial part (the equivalent of the clock face) takes a bit longer.
How it works
Before deciding how to mark your dial on the ceiling you need a basic grasp of how a sundial works. I’ll cover it in three points.
1 Everything the sun does outside is the inverse of what happens on the ceiling. As it moves across from east to west the reflected beam moves across the ceiling west to east. The lower the sun in the sky, the further into your room the beam is projected.
2 The route of the spot changes daily, sweeping across the ceiling between two extremes: the winter and summer solstices. In the middle of these extremes is the equinox; that’s the moment every 21 March and 22 September when the sun follows the same course in the sky and the days are exactly the same length as the nights. Mark out your dial on a date that’s as close to the equinox as possible; this will help you position the equinox line (the mid point of your dial) close to the middle of the ceiling.
3 The hours fall within flared bands that radiate from a centre point somewhere outside your window.
THE DIAL
Now you’re ready to mark your dial. Start the whole process in the morning, close to the time you want the dial to be most effective.
Look at the time and position the mirror so that it throws a spot on the ceiling wherever you think best, remembering that you need to be able to see the time easily when lying in bed. Leave space for the hours you’d like to come before and after.
Diehard sundial fans mark a central ‘meridian’ – the line the sun crosses at midday. But that’s way too late. I prefer to make 9 o’clock the centre of things – one side is a lie-in, the other side isn’t. By restricting the range to the vital few hours of the morning your dial can be more accurate, and you don’t need such a big ceiling.
Seventeenth-century sundial obsessives started young. Isaac Newton drew his first ceiling sundial as a boy of 12. And at just 16 the young Christopher Wren drew an elaborate dial on the ceiling of his room at Oxford. Wren’s sundial came a few years before Newton’s, who was 5 at the time.
THE OFFICIAL LINE OF LATENESS
Mark the hours with stickers or pencil crosses (you still need your clock at this point). Before you begin to mark in your hour lines you need some of the year to pass. Mark the same time at the equinox and one of the solstices (or any two days a few months apart) and draw straight lines between them. Once you’ve got these hour lines in place, the dial starts to take shape. I use masking tape first before committing to paint, allowing me to tweak the lines later for supreme accuracy.
I’d start by marking only the hour by which you have to be out of bed making the simplest, clearest dial of all: a new meridian – the official line of lateness.
THE BEDROOM SHRINE
Five thousand years ago the inhabitants of Orkney built Maes Howe, a stone chamber expertly aligned so that on the winter solstice the setting sun sends a shaft of light along the entry passage to hit the back wall where the bones of the ancient elders were buried. Going to see it is a pretty good way to enthuse children with the whole idea of the celestial calendar. Or you could just show them the Indiana Jones movie that uses the same idea. Either way, you need to know that you can adapt the window-sill mirror trick to make your own bedroom version of this sacred shrine.
Pick your significant date (say a birthday).
Through careful positioning of the mirror mark a suitable spot where the celestial beam will hit the wall.
Now position your chosen icon (football poster, cartoon character, darts trophy) so that at sunrise or sunset on the given day it is kissed by the golden rays that peep over the horizon. You will need to provide the soundtrack yourself.
Alternative suggestion: I often use the sunspot as a random CD-selection technique. But as a seasonal touch you could arrange things so that at 10am on 25 December a sunbeam illuminates the Phil Spector Christmas CD on the shelf, in preparation for its annual outing.
Urban bushcraft through the ages: Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford) 1753–1814
To round off our exploration of the indoors, here’s an account of what happens when a great inventor turns his mind to the home.
Benjamin Thompson was by all accounts a scoundrel, and a good-looking one too. One biographer says he was ‘overbearingly arrogant and had no friends’, which seems a bit pointed. Anyway, he had to leave his native America in a hurry after he backed the wrong side in the War of Independence and spent the rest of his life in Europe, picking up wives and titles while pursuing his career as a scientist.
But what I love about him is that his boundless curiosity was unfettered by the snobbish view that science is too grand