Wild Wood

An Outdoor Survival Challenge

I’ve always been a keen camper, but I’m nowhere near as tough as Bear Grylls or Ray Mears. For me it’s fair weather all the way.

But a few of my tougher camping buddies were discussing what they would need, as a minimum, in order to spend a few nights outdoors at this time of year in the UK (its springtime and still very cold at night).

We concluded that the bare essentials would consist of shelter, somewhere warm to sleep and the means to create fire and find food and water. So the outcome of the beer fuelled conversation has been the challenge for us to spend two days and nights surviving and sleeping outdoors.

We will take some tents, a cosy and warm sleeping bag each, a knife and some water, as well as warm clothes and stout footwear. This is all the camping gear that we’ll be taking.

We’re not allowing ourselves to take a lighter or matches, which will make it tough to start a fire and we will not be taking any food. This will mean foraging for nuts and berries, at a time of year when there isn’t much available, and possibly trapping and eating rabbits, if we can.

This reminds me of a similar challenge that I undertook way back when I was a boy scout. On that occasion we had no tents so we had to build our own shelters as well as starting fires without lighters or matches. We had to build a bivouac and start a fire by means of friction. I recall that this was a lot of hard work, but we did it.

Without doubt, the most useful item that we took with us that time was our knives. You may have noticed how this is the key survival essential that Bear Grylls always has with him when he parachutes into a wilderness somewhere. Armed with a good quality knife you’re able to cut wood for fire or a shelter. You can skin and prepare a rabbit for cooking and make the snare needed to trap the rabbit in the first place.

So I hope that you will wish me luck on my forthcoming survival challenge weekend. But I shall definitely be taking my mobile phone so if we don’t have any luck with rabbits or road kill I’ll be able to call for a pizza!

Paul Weller plays ‘Wild Wood’ live (Live Wood)