How to make fire
Nothing will make you feel more like a bushcraft god than mastering the art of making fire. It also makes for a neat party trick - if your mates are willing to sit and watch you laboriously rub bits of wood together for a long time while cursing and sweating. Actually, on second thoughts, it's a rubbish party trick.

Step one: First you need to make a bow, so get a long, slightly bendy stick and tie a string (or shoelace) to each end, all bow-like.

Step two: Next, prepare a "drill" by whittling another stick so one end is blunt and the other end pointy, and then twist it into the centre of the bow string.

Step threeGet yourself a plank of dry wood, cut a small depression in it, and place the blunt end of the drill against it, holding the drill upright and pressing down on the pointy end with a bit of rock.

Step fourOh God, it's like following one of Jamie's posher recipes... repeatedly draw the bow backwards and forwards so the drill turns rapidly, causing enough friction with the plank to begin smoking.

At this point you place a clump of tinder (dry stuff like shredded leaves or bark) right alongside the rotating drill end until it hopefully catches and starts smoking too. Blow onto it and voila: you are Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods. Maybe.

How to make water safe to drink
One of the most important things you need to do in the wild is find water that won't make you throw up or die. For this reason, you need to literally boil the life out of any water you do manage to gather.

This is easy enough if you have a fireproof container which you can just plonk onto a campfire. But what if you only have a plastic tub, or something you've carved out of flimsy wood? The ancient, time-honoured and annoyingly fiddly technique of rock boiling is the answer.

What you basically do is put a load of stones into a fire and wait until they are white hot. Then, using sticks, you carefully drop the stones into your container of water to heat the stuff up. You need to keep replacing them to maintain a steady boil, and you'll probably keep dropping hot stones everywhere, and it'll take ages to get the liquid to the right temperature, and for goodness sake the water probably won't kill you anyway, right? Forget the stones and just drink it down like Rambo would.

How to find emergency food
You know you shouldn't have taken that fork in the road signposted "Short cut through wilderness". Damn it, now you're stranded in the deep dark woods and you're hungry. So, what's on the menu?

You'll no doubt be disappointed to learn that caterpillars are generally not worth eating, as they can be rather toxic and their hairs can make you come out in a nasty rash. You'll be extremely pleased to know, however, that wood ant larvae makes for a lovely nutritious dinner.

You can collect the larvae by placing a bit of tarpaulin next to an ant's nest and breaking the nest open to let the ants and larvae fall onto the tarp. Then you fold over one side of the tarp to create a shade, as the ants will helpfully collect their larvae and place them in the shade ready for you to scoop up. They look like puffed rice, so just think of it as Rice Krispies, Mears-style.

Earthworms are also good to guzzle, especially if stored in salt water until they go a healthy pink in colour. And the very grossness of sucking those tasty morsels down should appeal to your show-offy, Ray Mears side. If it doesn't, then what are you doing reading this? Go and look at the UKTV Food website instead, you wimp.

How to build a shelter
You can't call yourself Ray Mears until you're able to create a debris hut. And even then we'd advise against calling yourself Ray Mears unless that actually happens to be your name.

The debris hut is the standard, bottom-line, absolutely essential shelter to make if you're in a forest and in need of a kip. What you need is one long thick log, one end of which rests on the ground while the other is allowed to rest a metre or so up a standing tree trunk. This is the spine of your shelter, and you create a "rib cage" by placing countless branches and twigs all along the log in a lattice.

What you're left with is a big long twiggy branchey cocoon, over which you must heap plenty (and we mean plenty) of leaves, mud, bushy things and anything else that comes to hand (not live animals). After you've formed this insulating layer, the standard procedure is to crawl inside, lie down and rue the day you ever got interested in bushcraft.

What to do if you're lost
So what happens if you find yourself well and truly lost? Well, you'll probably want to panic and rush around and babble to yourself and generally act like a complete idiot.

Instead, complete calm is required, as you need to reserve your energy. It's generally advisable not to move far and to actually hunker down, create a base (perhaps with one of those debris huts that you're now so good at making) and set up an internationally recognised distress signal. Which is simply three campfires arranged in a triangle. In fact, three of anything arranged in a triangle is a recognised distress signal, so improvise.

And if you have reason to believe there won't be anyone coming your way anytime soon, then mark your current position with a pile of rocks and walk away in one direction until you come to something useful. Like a stream, which can be followed to civilisation. Or a wood-dwelling family of inbred freaks, who'll bring your troubles to an end very promptly.

Now go forth and survive...
You are now ready to head out into the wilds of the world (or your local park) to live off the land, build your own shelter and hopefully not get arrested for being a weird worm-eating vagrant. Happy bushcrafting!