While it’s possible to skin a bird, they will keep for longer if simply plucked, and you will not lose the calorie value of the skin. Chop off the head and feet. Start plucking at the stomach and move outwards.
• Suspend the animal by its front feet. Pinch and lift some skin away from the stomach near the ribs and make an incision about 5 cm long. (You pinch it to ensure you don’t pierce the organs by mistake and cause a spill.)
• Cut carefully down towards the rear of the animal and up to the breastbone. The guts will spill out. Cut out the kidneys and liver. If any of the guts or organs look discoloured or mottled, do not keep them.
• Cut through the membrane over the chest cavity to get to the heart and lungs, then pull them out too. Ensure the bum is clear by pushing through the hole, then wash it with water.
/FIRE
It’s hard to think where we’d be without fire. It is a mark of civilization. A sign of warmth and often welcome. It makes your water safe and your food more interesting and edible. So let me tell you about fire.
It needs a spark and some highly flammable fuel and oxygen to keep going. If you want a big fire, you need to give it lots of oxygen and lots of fuel. If you want a small fire, don’t fan the flames and you will have a sort of barbecue effect that requires less fuel. Smouldering is good, smoking is bad. Smoking means you are wasting fuel. Chemistry lesson over, let’s move on to how you actually get that spark.
Take a box of matches or a lighter… now wouldn’t that be nice? For this exercise you are going to make your own spark, so you will need lots of dry fuel in various sizes:
Tinder – such as wood shavings, pages ripped from books (I have left you a couple spare at the end of this one), newspaper, pine needles, feathers or cotton.
Kindling – dry sticks and small logs.
Your main fuel – whether it be wood and coal, or a mix of sand with oil or petrol in a deep hole, dried animal droppings, or peat logs dried out over a fire.
Pick a spot. It needs to be on dry ground, or on a raised area made of rocks or wood above wet ground if that is all you can find. Clear away all the leaves and general muck around the area where you want the fire. You will need ventilation, or at least a chimney, but not too much wind. If it is very windy, dig a little hole for the fire.
Put dry rocks around the fire. This will stop it from spreading if it is very windy. The rocks can also be used as stands for pots, and later can be wrapped in clothing and used to warm your sleeping bag.
Warning: Do not use wet or flaky rocks as the change in temperature and pressure could lead them to explode.
There are many ways to produce a spark. I will start with the easiest method and head back to cave-man times.
Battery method: Take a car battery or a large torch battery and attach two wires or jump-leads to the positive and negative outlets. Be very careful not to let them touch while you do this. Bring the opposite ends almost together close to your tinder and a spark will fly across. Catch it on your tinder, blow the flame and you have the beginnings of a fire.
Lens method: Take a strong pair of glasses or a magnifying glass, or use a broken light bulb or the end of a bottle – many things work, so experiment. Fiddle with the angle from the sun till you create a laser of light and direct it at your tinder. Blow gently as the spark takes and you have the makings of a fire.
Flint method: Flint is a stone found everywhere around the world. If you strike it with a steel knife (most pocket knives are made of stainless steel), it will spark very effectively.
Magnesium method: If you are very efficient, you might have a tinderbox complete with fluff, steel and flint. It may even have a block of magnesium as part of the kit. This is to be shaved off onto your tinder before you begin trying to make the spark.
Wooden drill method: Otherwise known as the hard-work method, this is used only by those caught totally unprepared. For this you need to add muscle and perseverance to the standard ingredients above – tinder, kindling, oxygen, fuel – plus a piece of flattish softwood and a hardwood stick.
Cut the hardwood stick into a point at one end.
Cut a v-shaped chunk out of one side of your softwood. Put your tinder in that nook or cranny and gouge a hole next to it with your knife.
Stand the stick in the hole and start turning it vigorously, rolling it between your hands, until the heat produced lights the hole and you can blow that gently onto the tinder.
Bow and wooden drill method: This makes the previous process faster, but you must have some string handy. Put a rock on top of your hardwood stick and you can add pressure to make the whole thing work better (see below).
Plough method: This uses the same implements as the drill method. Create a furrow in your softwood base (as shown below) and keep ‘ploughing’ the furrow with your hardwood stick until the smoking pieces of softwood fall down into a tiny fire and you can work it up to something larger.
For safety, eat local. Do not eat crudités or salads in the Sahara.
8/ Avoiding Trouble in Sex, Love and War
Joking and laughing is very important. Don’t take your work too seriously. It doesn’t pay to panic.
I don’t know what it is about danger, but it seems to make everyone horny. Beautiful sunsets, oysters and booze are an aphrodisiac for some. But put someone’s life on the line, surround them with others under the same pressure and bang – you have a recipe for a sexual explosion.
It might be 55° Celsius and the air con’s not working. You might not have washed for a week. You ran out of toothpaste a month ago. But none of that matters. And just like that, you are suddenly in a lot more trouble than you were before the cravings kicked in.
Sometimes, of course, craving has nothing to do with it – at least for female journalists. Jane Dutton told me: ‘It is amazing how many men will try to make a move on you – even politicians and bigwigs. When I first started out, people I grew up watching on television, 40 years older than me, were suddenly groping my leg. It made their colleagues resent me. It is hard learning how to put these men in their place and retain relationships on a professional level.’
In Baghdad after the war people were hopping from bed to bed like rabbits in springtime. There were no rules, and even less judgement at play. The place was lawless, and for a small but hardcore minority, so was the bedroom. One neighbour of mine was managing to juggle two girls on the same floor of our (very small) hotel. I thought that was quite impressive until we went to a party at a nearby hotel and another girl sat on his lap while he talked about his girlfriend back home. I met good wives and husbands who kept their wedding rings hidden away. And men and women who threw long-held sexual identities out of the nearest hotel window. They were gay for a day or a month… Offers you wouldn’t give a thought to at home can seem suddenly sexy when dressed in danger.