Saga Of The Bunnies, Part the Second

I must be psychic. The saga of the bunnies HAS made its way into the local paper:













I'm still disappointed they didn't use my headline.

The Best Mug In The World

A friend got this for me for my birthday.

















It is the best mug in the world, ever.

The Saga of the Bunnies

Last week, a petition went around my office for people to sign to say that they opposed the extermination of the bunny rabbits that hop and gambol around the Civic Centre. (Before signing it, I checked the date to ensure we hadn't skipped ahead to April 1st.) I tried to imagine what the headline would be in the local paper: "Council Kills Bunnies At Easter", probably.

Today, good news came around on the internal staff email. The bunnies are safe, and, should they ever need to be moved, they will be humanely caught and released at a suitable location.

If that ever happens, I'm going to be eyeing the stew in the canteen with deep misgivings.

Some of My Favourite Quotes

Some of my favourite quotes of late:

From Rob Hunt's "Never Mind the Buoyancy" column in Sport Diver magazine:

"It's not that I'm against people "having their say" (except when it's in regard to why I haven't done the washing up), it's just that when that say is from someone who is massively ill-informed, I should be able to push them off a chair."


From Jonah Lehrer's article "Our Horizons" in the Observer:

"There should be an adjective (a synonym of sober, only worse) to describe the state of mind that comes from waiting in the orange glare of a streetlight [in the early hours of the morning] before drinking a cup of coffee."


And an all-time classic from Kurt Vonnegut:

"In the event of car alarms, every neighbourhood should have a bazooka, with a responsible adult knowing where to find it." (Timequake)

Got My Advanced Open Water

I headed off to Bute for a weekend of diving and exploring the strange and eccentric (but charming) pubs of Rothesay. I'll be cycling there this summer, so pub research was important.

It was great fun but cold. One of our trainee divemasters has just acquired a drysuit. We have had to open the equivalent of a swearbox where every time she says "drysuit" or "warm", she has to put in 20p.

It was somewhat cold in Bute.

6 degree C water temp, which feels as cold as it sounds. I have to say that I tip my hat to the manufacturers of my semidry suit*, which did its thing with remarkable insulating properties. Even so, I can reeeally see the appeal of a drysuit. Though, at around £400-£600 for the suit plus the undersuit plus the training to use it safely this might be a while coming for me.

I did the standard deep and navigation dives, plus a night dive, peak performance buoyancy dive and underwater photography dive. Great fun! The navigation dive was interesting because the visibility was AWFUL - it really was a case of "follow that compass"! Never have I been so glad to see the bright green fin of Singing Chief Instructor the... chief instructor. (Single fin. His other one is black so that he can't get mixed up with anyone else. Singing Chief Instructor, henceforth known as SCI because I can't be bothered to keep typing it out, is awesome.)

Interestingly enough, the deep dive was not my deepest dive ever, at 21m. That was a 23m dive I logged in the Maldives. Let me assure you that if you're thinking "23m in warm clear tropical water is way different to 21m in dark, murky, cold British waters", you are entirely right. Depth does not scare me in itself, but it was cold. It's traditional to make a diver on their first deep dive perform a task at depth such as writing their name and address on an underwater slate. This is so that you can see the slowing-down effects of nitrogen narcosis ("the narcs"**) at depth. By the end of it I was thinking "I really hope SCI doesn't make me write my name on the slate - so far no nitrogen narcosis, but my fingers have stopped working".

More on the other dives and the entertaining pubs of Bute shortly. Also probably some photos of crabs.

But, YAY, for being back diving! Yes!


* Semidry suit. Essentially a very thick wetsuit with a certain amount of marketing guff attached. Basically it keeps you warm like a wet suit, by trapping water next to your body, which heats up. A semidry, unlike a normal wet suit, has rubber seals at the neck, wrists and ankles, so that the warm water stays in and doesn't wash in and out of the suit. Surprisingly comfortable if fitted properly. Also they make you feel like a superhero in your brightly-coloured skintight suit, as you pull it on and fasten up your black boots, ready for your next adventure...

This is somewhat spoiled by the fact that you have to strategically plan a pee ten minutes in advance.


** The narcs = "nitrogen narcosis", caused by breathing air (which has nitrogen in, as we all know) under pressure at depth. No-one quite knows how it happens. Essentially the deeper you go, the more thick-headed you can become, like being drunk. This can be a major problem if you need to react quickly to a problem. It is, fortunately, relatively easy to solve - you ascend slowly until the symptoms resolve - and doesn't leave permanent effects. Not to be confused with the bends, on which more shortly.

To Comment On This Blog...

Click on the bit where it says "0 Comments" in green writing beneath the post in question, and the comments box will appear.

Paradoxical Antacid Tablets

Would be a really pretentious band name.

I've been suffering from heartburn recently, though it's rapidly getting better. I have no idea why this is.

But why do they make the antacid tablets so large, it really hurts to swallow them? You'd think a product aimed at people with sore oesophaguses would be easy to get down.

Rocket Guy

Well, just over a week ago I did a refresher dive in Benfield pool, and thankfully it turned out not to be a case of "all mouth and no wetsuit". We practised standard skills: mask removal and clearing, taking the scuba unit (BCD+, tank and regs) off*, breathing from a free-flowing regulator++, hovering, fin pivot, and CESA**.

I was slightly dreading the mask removal. This is the one skill that a lot of divers HATE having to do on their training dives, although some say they don't mind it. No-one likes losing their vision under water, and getting cold water straight in your face (I did my training dives in the Firth of Clyde off the west Scottish coast) is no-one's idea of a fun time. It is, however, essential to master since it's not completely unknown to have a mask strap break, or a mask knocked off whilst diving. I was actually quite relieved when the instructor indicated we'd do that first, and pointed at me to go first. I took one breath, then pulled the mask off and shut my eyes.

My first thought was "Damn, I hate breathing through a regulator without having my nose covered by the mask" (diving masks cover your nose). It sounds daft, but the bubbles go right up your nose and it's no fun. I breathed maskless for a minute. This is also a skill, since if you lost your mask completely on a dive you'd have to be able to breathe through the reg without it until you made it safetly up to the surface. I then pressed the mask back on my face, slid the strap over the back of my head, tipped my head back a little and held the top of the mask against my forehead with the palm of my hand. Breathe in, blow out smoothly through nose, let the air force the water out and... open eyes.

I looked out through a perfectly-cleared mask, and had to resist the urge to do the Underwater Victory Dance. (There wasn't enough room - it's a small pool.) Go, me!

Here is a video of a PADI Course Director doing this with much more grace than me:








We next practised buoyancy skills. A skilled diver can sit on the bottom of the pool, inflate their buoyancy jacket just enough to rise off the bottom as they breathe in, then hover almost motionless in the water, controlling their buoyancy as they breathe in and out.

I'd like to think I'm a skilled diver. Unfortunately, I was wearing my own fins, meaning that I was wearing my neoprene diving boots. (I have open-heel fins which fasten with a strap at the back to allow you to wear boots underneath them, meaning that you have to wear the boots, otherwise the fins don't fit.) Neoprene is buoyant in water, meaning that my feet are more buoyant than the rest of me. I can hover in the water, but, alas, only in a position where I'm on my back with my feet floating above me, like an upturned and possibly dying turtle. Hilariously funny for anyone watching. Next time I do this I'm going to try wearing little weights around my ankles, and see if this fixes the problem.

At least I was doing better than Rocket Guy. I probably shouldn't call him that, but it's hard to resist. He was one of the other refresher students, and could not seem to quite grasp the concept of "you put SMALL amounts of air in your jacket, because BIG amounts of air will make you so buoyant you float to the top", despite the instructor's increasingly insistent hand signals. Ah well. After he'd gone from the pool bottom to the surface a few times he seemed to get it.

Towards the end, we practised our CESAs (see below). CESA is meant to be done on one lungful of air, since that's what you'd have in a real OOA (out-of-air) emergency. You swim from one side of the pool to the other, beneath the water, keeping the regulator in your mouth and exhaling as you go.

Rocket Guy didn't seem to get this, either. We know this because, when you exhale underwater, you blow bubbles.

Rocket Guy had a string of bubbles coming from his mouth... until about halfway across the pool, when they stopped. He was obviously breathing through his regulator!

He seemed a bit surprised when the instructor finally signalled "Go Up" and explained it to him on the surface.

Ah well. As I hauled my dripping self out of the pool, I was grinning like a idiot. Truly, I love diving. Maybe I was a fish in a past life.

+ BCD = Buoyancy Compensator (or Controlling) Device. For most sports divers, an inflatable jacket like a lifejacket, which has a valve attached to the air tank and inflates and deflates. Fish have swim bladders, divers have BCDs. It also holds the air tank on your back. Utterly essential to diving as it's used to control your buoyancy both at depth and on the surface, where having something that keeps you afloat without you having to kick to keep your head above water is essential. You sometimes see "backmounted" BCDs, or "wings", where the air cell (which inflates) is on the diver's back. These are more usually favoured by technical divers, who typically dive with two or more tanks of gas.

* If you're wondering why on earth you'd do this, it's sometimes necessary if you're unlucky enough to get entangled in something and need a bit more wriggle room to get yourself free. And yes, the regulator mouthpiece stays in your mouth throughout.

++ Free-flow: when the valve in the regulator sticks open, meaning that the air flow doesn't shut off. This is a "fail-safe" feature. If the regulator fails, better it fails in a way that means you can still get air from it, albeit you are losing air very fast and need to head for the surface at the safest possible rate. Breathing from a freeflowing regulator is often described, accurately, as being like trying to drink from a fire hose.

** CESA = Controlled Emergency Swimming Ascent. Technique of near last-resort if a diver runs completely out of air and there is no-one around them to give them their spare regulator for their air tank. (Avoiding this situation is why divers are supposed to dive in pairs and stick close together. Also why you're meant to check your air gauge, often.) You keep all your gear on and swim directly up to the surface exhaling all the way. The exhalation, usually done by going "AAAAAHHH" like you're at the dentist's, is to ensure that the pressurised air in your lungs can safely escape as it expands on the ascent, so no lung damage should be caused. You can do this from anywhere up to about 9m depth. Beyond that depth, you are in (even more) serious trouble if you run out of air.

CESA is in the same category as wearing a car seatbelt. You don't ever plan to need it, and you should always do everything you can (drive carefully / stick close to your buddy and check your air gauge) to avoid it. But if ever you do need it, then, like a seatbelt or a parachute, you'd better hope it works first time, because if it doesn't, odds are you won't be in a position to use it again.

Diving does not have to be dangerous. Driving a car is probably more dangerous, and I don't fear for my safety when I get in my car. But equally, it would be stupid to pretend it has no risks, which is why driving / diving instructors train their students to do emergency stops / CESAs (and other safety techniques), and, most importantly, THINK.

All Mouth and No Wetsuit

Is what I hope I will not be. I'm off to do a dive weekend soon, in which I'll be starting my Advanced Open Water qualification. In which I will do five dives, each in a different speciality, and then be qualified to dive deeper and do more challenging dives.

As I haven't gotten my wetsuit wet in about four months, I've been swatting up on my dive knowledge. I'm having a refresher dive in Benfield pool soon and hoping that I don't show myself up as the world's biggest diving idiot.

So, there'll be few posts from me for a while, but I'll be back soon with more tales of diving hilarity. Catch you all soon.

A Strange, Orc-Like Race...

...specially bred to keep the Scots out of England, was the Pub Landlord (Al Murray's) verdict on Geordies.

He may have been right. One night last week I was cycling home clad in my usual winter gear, in which I have a minimum of two layers of clothing all round me. Except for my face, though I do wear a balaclava for the entertainment of passers-by. As I was chugging along past Heaton Park thinking "bugger me it's cold bugger me it's cold bugger me it's cold, hot chocolate here I come", a man cycled past me wearing Lycra shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt.

If civilisation as we know it ends, the North-East will carry on as normal. Clearly the loss of heat and power won't bother Geordies in the least.

I think they've all got extra layers of subcutaneous fat under the skin for insulation, and the rest of us will just never achieve their immunity to cold.

Even so, cycling dude? Lycra is not a good look.

Are You Looking For Your Tears Behind The Butter?

It's all change in my office, as we move around desks. I'm actually quite happy about it, as I've wanted to sit with my colleagues for a while. It did mean we had to move around some of the tea supplies.

One of my colleagues has an eye condition which requires her to put artificial tears in her eyes every so often. She keeps the tubes in the fridge, meaning that earlier this week, we had a minor panic until we located them behind the butter in the fridge door.

It's not quite as good as the "marijuana tin in the nativity scene" story (that's for another day), but it was quite amusing.

Cycling Past Frozen Water

Would be lovely if I was mountain biking past a frozen lake. As it is, it's March and I'm cycling past frosted-over puddles on the roads. Will this winter ever end?

Drugs, Followed By Cheese

Would make for an interesting party. Anyway, I bought my Dad Alex James's autobiography, "Bit of a Blur" for his birthday, and my Mum wandered past and casually uttered this brilliant four-word summary.

I'm not sure I need to read the book now.