Steakhouse Gryll

Quite by chance this month I’ve caught a couple of episodes of “Born Survivor” presented by Mr Nice Tough Guy, Bear Grylls. Yes. That’s his real name.

I’m hoping he has a kid brother called Radiator.

The premise is very simple. Bear Grylls, all round daredevil, adventurer, survivalist and, let’s not forget it, nice guy, is catapulted each week into some of the world worst hellholes there to survive on nothing but his wits and the Winnebago full of food that the film crew have brought along with them.

He’s yomped across desert, jungle and rough council estates; he’s captured and eaten raw lizards, scorpions, beetle larvae and KFC bargain buckets; he’s been up to his hips in quick sand, white water rapids and peat bogs... and last night saw him roughing it in the mountainous ice fields of Patagonia.

It was sterling stuff and no mistake. He dug an ice cave with his “bear” hands, urinated into his drink flask and used it as a hot water bottle, rapelled down a 150ft waterfall... all the while telling us what we should and shouldn’t do in these circumstances; leaving us in no doubt as to the amount of danger and peril that he was constantly in on our behalf.

And through it all I couldn’t help thinking: Ray Mears wouldn’t have done that; Ray Mears would have found a better way; Ray wouldn’t have taken such stupid risks in the first place...

Ray Mears you see is untouchable in the art of bush craft survival. Many try to encroach upon his domain but few can ever match him. I’m sure Mr Grylls’ survivalist credentials are absolutely impeccable but, unlike Ray’s programmes, there’s something just too unreal and contrived about Bear Grylls’ gritty offerings.

Suspended half way down a narrow glacial crevasse he shuddered at how far down he was, how terrifying it was to be stuck this far down a sheer ice wall... but my first thought was that the camera man was actually filming him from below and didn’t appear to be suffering from camera-shake at all. A little later he tried to build a raft out of drift wood to cross an ice cold lake... a few feet out it began to disintegrate and Bear had to bare his torso and swim back to shore before he lost all circulation in his feet and legs...

Gasp shock horror. Would he make it? Sadly, yes.

Now if that had been Ray he’d have chopped down a tree, hollowed out a canoe with his bush knife and woven a fully functional outboard motor out of nettle stems and crossed to the other side of the lake within the space of three hours with enough daylight left to shoot a moose with his homemade bow and arrow and have its kidney frying on a hot rock ready for the after filming party.

And Ray would have spent the entire night in his homemade camp with only his homemade campfire and his hand whittled camp equipment for company and nobody would have doubted it in the slightest. I can’t say the same for Bear. There are loads of reports that he frequently “roughed” it in hotels and glamorous Jacuzzis once the day’s filming was done.

Fair enough you might think. But to me it’s cheating. Don’t attempt to seize the mantle of hard-man wilderness survivor if you’re not prepared to sleep with the leeches and the tarantulas!

Bear, Ray would eat you for bloody breakfast.

Bug Lust

I’ve just spent the morning checking the pest traps in the Museum where I work... or going on a "bug hunt" as I call it.

It’s one of those odd little components of my job that normal visitors to the Museum wouldn’t even think about as they scuff their Nike’s over the newly mopped floor in search of distraction and edification among the ranks of teeming display cases that make this proud edifice of education exactly what it is. A Museum.

Basically I have to "do the rounds" once a month to make sure that the Museum stores are not being infested with woodworm, death-watch beetle or some such other many-legged nasty creepy-crawly with a penchant for munching on works of art or artefacts of historic importance.

It is not one of my favourite jobs.

1) I don’t particularly like insects at the best of times and the thought of having to get up and close and personal with them after they’ve been left mouldering for a month in the dark corners of the Museum stores just turns my stomach. To quote a line from The Mummy, they get rather "juicy".

2) The traps themselves are coated with a sticky goo impregnated with insect pheromones. It drives the little fellas wild. So much so they fly or crawl straight into the traps without a single thought for their own mortality – just a blind need to get their chitinous ends away – and there they become stuck fast and basically starve to death. Not quite the end they were looking to get, I’m sure you’ll agree. And unfortunately it’s nigh on impossible to examine these pest traps without getting some of this love goo on your fingers.

Despite copious hand washing I will now spend the rest of the day – particularly while I’m eating my sandwiches for lunch – with the discomforting suspicion that my fingers are now vertitable love-beacons for every randy insect within a 20 yard radius.

Love, as they say, is in the air...