How to predict the weather with a cup of coffee: And other techniques for surviving the 9–5 jungle. Matthew Cole

he wrote.

      Rumford’s area of expertise was heat, and everything associated with it. But there were no steam locomotives and spinning machines for him. Instead, he revolutionised the domestic fireplace forever, did the same for the cooker and then repeated the feat for the coffee percolator. And then came his chef-d’œuvre. While remarking upon the low heat conductivity of egg white he found another of his fantastic domestic applications for science when he gave the world Baked Alaska.^* I can’t imagine that Leonardo, for all his much-vaunted inventiveness, would have thought to putice cream inside a baked dessert.

      THE SIOUX ALARM CLOCK

      At times when you don’t want to trust your fate to a gadget powered by a couple of AAs, remember the Sioux warrior.

      When a Sioux needed to wake early to go into battle or to follow a trail he simply used his bladder as an early morning call. The earlier he wanted to be woken, the more water he drank at bedtime. I’ve tried it once and the calibration needed some improvement, but the technique can’t be faulted.

       2. TRAVEL WITH A SMALL‘T’

       ‘So, which way did you come; was it M5 – M6 – M62?’

       ‘Yes, that’s right. I was going to go M5 – M42 – M1, but there was a contra-flow at Solihull.’

       ‘Ah, right.’

      I don’t think I’ve ever arrived at the end of a long drive and not found myself part of this little men-only ritual: the route conversation. I’ve been a keen student of this one for a few years, and I marvel at the variety of ways we can find to tee up a bout of swapping road numbers. Both men are reciting a script they know by heart, slotting the pieces into a puzzle that celebrates an obsession with how we got here. I always want to go for a little high five at the end, but that hasn’t quite caught on.

      I mention this because it helps identify what this section is all about: travel with a small ‘t’. The urban bushman isn’t interested in capital ‘T’ travel – with trips of a lifetime; he’s focused on being home by teatime. He doesn’t care about the opening times of the Genghis Khan memorial in Ulan Bator; he wants to know how to get the best seat on the number 58 into town.

      Travel doesn’t have to have an exotic destination to broaden the mind. Simply bring the spirit of the great explorers to the daily commute turns it from lost time into a heroic endeavour. My favourite Victorian, Sir Francis Galton, wrote in The Art of Travel: ‘Thescientific advantages of travel are enormous to a man prepared to profit by them.’^* And it’s in that spirit that e learn how to navigate by satellite dish or use a motorway trip to cook chicken wings on the car engine. Whatever our chosen mode of travel, we’re moving on in the name of science and of adventure.