How men can resuscitate their savage past in the urban jungle

On the way home from a family outing a few decades ago, the windscreen wipers on Cole Senior's car packed up in driving rain and the family were forced to stop under a motorway bridge to consider the options. "Twenty minutes later, we were back on the M1 southbound with wipers flip-flopping across the windscreen, but this time they were powered by a length of string fed into both back windows. My brother and I pulled as my sister called time."

As Matthew says, the engineering wasn't much to shout about but a few yards of string and knots had transformed a disaster into an adventure, and the wipers now had voice-operated speed control. Back then, many men seemed to have this sort of nous hard-wired into their DNA, and they had the collection of assorted spanners, wrenches, soldering irons, hooks, nails, string and Araldite to see them through most eventualities using their skill at improvisation.

Matthew was much impressed by his father's self-sufficiency, know-how and the simplicity of his solutions to problems, like easing a punctured tyre off the wheel rim with a couple of spoons instead of a lever manufactured specifically for the job. Now a father himself, he decided to write a book that would help today's father's to impress their children. Bringing together the laws of science, nature and human behaviour, he aims to "reinvent the tricks that got us through our savage past and update them for the 21st century".

Apart from the skills he observed in his father, Matthew Cole has been infected by the zeal of being a TV producer who shared an office with the team that made the bushwhacking shows fronted by the intrepid Ray Mears. You don't need to wear camouflage trousers and a silly hat to have adventures, though, says Cole.

He believes today's urban men – for it is men that this book is chiefly aimed at – are trapped in a lifestyle that runs against their primeval urge to take on nature and the elements, figuring out their own simple solutions to the basic problems life throws at them.

He's not suggesting the male of the species returns to desert, swamp or jungle – the nearest most modern men will get to the desert is a square mile without a cash machine – but he does advocate taking on the world armed with a ball of string and some clear, simple thinking.

Men who find some excitement is missing from their lives might be delighted to learn about bushcraft with your slippers on: how to freeze your hard-drive to unblock it; sticking your phone in the microwave (not with it switched on, silly) to reduce the signal and get rid of a boring caller; how to use slugs to remove difficult-to-budge burnt food from a pan; how to create a sundial on the ceiling using a mirror on the window ledge (also known as a Sioux alarm clock); and how to make chopsticks from bits of yukka plant or stir-fry from spider plants and other green things in pots. How to break a lock with a sock or make a rucksack from your trousers could be invaluable, too.

Cole has done his homework, reading up on ancient almanacs, farmers' knowledge and bushcraft skills, and tracing quite a sizeable portion of his little tricks to skills cultivated by Native Americans and other tribes around the world.

A recent survey showed that today's fathers spent 30 minutes a day more with their children than the previous generation, and he thinks that time would be well spent learning how to make things, fix things or study human behaviour – be it only the body language that tells you who's going to get off the bus next so you can have their seat – rather than sitting around the house or doing chores. But does he really think the generation that downloads everything at the tap of a button is going to be impressed easily by knowing whether an iPod can be charged using an onion (it can't be done, however the idea's exciting) or predicting the weather using a cup of sweet coffee (this is apparently reliable for very short-term forecasting)?

"Learning simple skills that don't involve technology enables men to show off to their kids. And you know all men like to show off."

How to Predict the Weather With a Cup of Coffee and Other Techniques for Surviving the 9-5 Jungle by Matthew Cole is published by Collins, 8.99. To order from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop call 0800 0153232 or go to www.yorkshirepostbook shop.co.uk. Postage and packing

is 2.75.