Roadcat

December 23, 2012 7:00am

I spent last night cuddled up to the dogs, for warmth, beneath a pine tree and woke before daybreak with the birds making a racket.



Needless to say after the terrors of yesterday and with nothing but the clothes on my back to keep me warm, I didn't sleep very well. I'm stiff, thirsty, cold and hungry. But mostly I'm cold. Breakfast was a handful of acorns that the squirrels hadn't discovered. I peeled them and then ground them into a paste mixed with a little water. Quite bitter but the first food I've eaten in a few days - wish there was more of them.



If I'm going to survive my current situation my first priority must be to have fire. There is plenty of water available in puddles and ponds, and if I have fire I can boil it to make it safe to drink. I've been thinking about this since I woke up; there seem to be 2 ways to go about lighting a fire that are available to me. Firstly I have my glasses and could probably use a lens to focus the sun. Unfortunately it's winter in England and that means that the sun is hidden by a constant overcast sky, so scratch that idea. My other chance is to make a flint and steel. The Fens where I am has no shortage of flint and so after just a couple of minutes of scrabbling in the dirt I unearthed several decent pieces.



The next thing I need is steel. I've never tried to light a fire with a flint and steel, but I have a suspicion that you want carbon steel to get a spark off of. I fled the house in such a hurry and so unexpectedly that I don't have a single scrap of metal with me, not even a door-key. As an experiment I wasted 10 fruitless minutes trying to strike a spark off of various metal buttons and zips on my jacket and jeans, but unsurprisingly without luck. I'm not prepared to go near houses again, at least not until all my other options have been exhausted there's too much of a chance of running into one of those creatures again, my best bet to find a piece of carbon steel has got to be the A14 motorway. It's several miles away, so I'd better start walking.