Had A Good Christmas, Saw The Family

That answers the two questions most people like to ask around this time of year. To answer the third, "Yes, some lovely presents, especially the creme brulee kit".

And here' my favourite joke of the year, which isn't really:

"A ginger dude, a mixed-race woman, and an ex-Somali immigrant walk into a bar.

Everyone buys them a drink".

Farewell, 2012.

So, Here We Are...

It's nearly Christmas and I'm heading south for the winter. The job application is in, and all that remains is for me to wish Merry Christmas to one and all, post this picture I took at Enchanted Parks this year, and share with you a few choice quotes from the year:

On navigation, whilst my car full of drivers attempts to navigate the roads of the island of Gozo:
Driver, approaching roundabout: "Do I need to turn left?"
Navigator, after staring at the map for a minute: "You can if you want to."
From the backseat: "You've got the map, man! You tell him where he needs to go!"

On music:
My brother, whilst DJ-ing, opn being asked to play Scooter:
[pause] "Sorry, love, I'll burn this place to the ground before I'll hear that shit played in here."

On office politics:
From a friend of mine: "I'd rather be a bull in a china shop than a viper lying in the grass."

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Still Not Feeling Very Festive

Not much to see here. I think the only thing I'll say is that whilst I really, really want to keep my job, the main thing I remember from when I was successful the last two times was a sensation of relief, followed by deflation.

It's a bit like what they say about getting a tax refund: any joy is short-lived when you remember that it was your damn money in the first place.

How To Get Information From The Council

Yup, it's confirmed. I'll definitely be interviewing for my own job in the New Year. Merry F**King Christmas!
Not had much time to do writing, so here's an old piece I wrote in a slightly bad mood after dealing with one too many well-meaning students who seemed to want me to do their job for them...


How To Get Information From The Council (and other similar organisations)

DISCLAIMER: I am a research officer working for a large city council, but I am writing in a personal capacity. This is intended as a light-hearted piece of advice to social research students, of whom I was recently one, who are thinking of contacting my employer to ask us to help them find data for their research projects. It is not intended in any way to reflect my employer's official position, nor am I speaking on behalf of them!

Do You Need To Telephone Us In The First Place?

Much statistical information is available online, both on the Council’s website and on other data websites such as the Office for National Statistics, and so forth. If you use your initiative and check these first to see if the information you want to find is there, you will save us both some time.


Be Prepared: Find Out Who You Want To Speak To First

Large local authorities employ several thousand staff and provide a huge variety of services. In terms of research, they will have quite a few research and policy staff in several different services (corporate research, housing, neighbourhood services, etc). The switchboard staff will always do their best to help, but they are not able to memorise exactly who out of all the hundreds of staff does what.

Ringing the switchboard and saying you want to speak to someone about some research you’re doing will probably get you put through to whichever research officer in the corporate research team is available to take the call, who may not necessarily be the best person to help you. At the least, be prepared to be specific: “I’d like to speak to someone about crime statistics in the West End last year” is much more helpful than “I’m doing some research”. If you can have a look on the Council’s website for the names of members of staff who work in the specific area you are interested in (try the “Community Engagement” section to find details of past consultations and research), even better.


Be Polite

Yes, we are public servants, and you are a member of the public. Yes, you have a right to expect us to be polite and helpful – and, if we are not, feel free to look up the Council’s complaints procedure and complain. It is, however, much appreciated if you begin your call by asking if this is a convenient time for us to have the discussion. The answer will nearly always be yes, and we greatly appreciate not being treated like a human version of Google.


Be Patient

Be prepared for the fact that you may get transferred a couple of times and have to explain what you want to a couple of different people. This will not necessarily happen, particularly if you have checked who the best person to speak to is. However, as mentioned above, the Council is a big organisation, and it may take a bit of time to locate the exact person who has the information you’re after.

I’ve encountered a couple of people – fortunately, they are rare – who seem to assume that the Council is some sort of hive mind and that (for example) because a researcher in the neighbourhood services research team, who I’ve never met, did some work two years ago on a topic they’re doing their dissertation on, as a research officer, I must of course be intimately familiar with this work and be instantly able to provide them with the details. Alas, no.


Research Staff Are Not Batman

We don’t sit around in our research Batcave, waiting for the research Batsignal to call us into action. If you call us, we will usually be in the middle of working on our own research projects on behalf of the Council, which is our main job. This does not at all mean that we don’t want to help you, or that we mind taking your call. Helping the public is, after all, what the Council exists to do. But please be aware that research staff will be working when you call us, and it is possible that we may be working to meet a deadline. If it’s going to be a long and involved query, be prepared for the fact that we may have to arrange to call you back at another time.


It’s Not My Job To Do Your Job

We will happily do our best to help you. However, part of doing research is finding the exact information you need for yourself. By which I mean, we will quite happily help you find where the information you seek is located, and suggest other sources you might want to try if we can’t help. Once we have found you this information, however, we will not (for example) read through several pages of data to find you the exact single figure you are after. This is your job and part of your research.


Just Because It’s Urgent To You, Doesn’t Mean It’s Urgent To Me

Again, we are public servants and we are here to serve the public. We will happily help you. However, please remember the point made earlier that we have our own workloads and deadlines. Be realistic and allow enough time to get your information, bearing in mind the fact that the person you need to speak to may not be available when you call, may be available but working to a deadline and unable to help you immediately, or may be on leave.


If you leave it until the last minute, then ring up in a panic and start demanding the information you need RIGHT NOW, this is unfair on the person you are contacting (who is, after all, taking time out from their regular workload to help you) and may well result in you not getting the data you are after.


Related point: most organisations do not allow people simply to walk in off the street and start talking to people in their offices without making an appointment first. Ring us, explain the situation, and if we can’t help you over the phone, then we can look at arranging a meeting. Do not show up at reception and start asking to talk to someone in the research team right now. (Even your tutors have office hours, right?)

Onward and Ever ***ing Well Upward

Well, I'm sorry. I'd meant to do some writing about diving, maybe a bit more about Malta. But I'm stuck in a position where I'm applying for my own job for the third time in 21 months. I've caught the office cold, and I can't take sick leave as it would immediately count against me in the selection process - your sickness record is part of the scoring system.

In a twist I actually find amusing, I'm in charge of designing the system for analysing the responses people have to the Council's budget proposals. (Many of them are not terribly happy.) So I am helping my employer to consult on the very same proposals that may put me out of a job in a few months' time.

Just before Christmas.

If I do end up on the scrapheap, I fear my leaving speech may be based on that of Glenn Cullen:

Glenn Cullen Resigns

Catch you on the flipside.

The Bitter Branches of War

Taking a break from diving: here's an article I wrote for my church newsletter after Remembrance Sunday, when I read out the lyrics of PJ Harvey's "Bitter Branches":


"Bitter branches
spreading out.
There's none more bitter
than the wood.

Into the wide world,
it grows,
twisting under
soldiers' feet,

standing in line
and the damp earth underneath.

Holding up their rifles
high,
holding their young wives
who wave goodbye.

Hold up the clear glass
to look and see
soldiers standing
and the roots twist underneath.

Their young wives with white hands
wave goodbye.

Their arms as bitter branches
spreading into the world.

Wave goodbye,
Wave goodbye."


I asked Dr Barry Thomas if he would like to include this song in the Remembrance Day Service on 11th November, and offered to read it. I thought people might like to know why. Partly, of course, it is that I am a great fan of PJ Harvey’s album, “Let England Shake”. (Whilst I did my best to do justice to it, I would also advise anyone who heard me to borrow the album from a friend or the library and hear the original, as PJ Harvey is as great a musician as a writer, and certainly far better than I am as a reader.) It is one of those rare albums where the songs work as well as poems as they do pieces of music. 

Why this song in particular? Remembrance Day, rightly, is filled with memorials to those who fell in combat. There can be very few settlements in our country, however small, which do not somewhere have a list of the names of the fallen men from the army, navy and air force who died in the first and second world wars. My own place of employment, Newcastle Civic Centre, has a memorial (near the Banqueting Hall) for those who fell in Burma, Korea, and other wars in South East Asia. 

I suppose my choice was partly inspired by a story I once heard, of a headmistress of a girls’ school during the First World War who, on hearing of the casualties of on the battlefield, spoke to her pupils in assembly the next day, saying: “Girls, I have terrible news. Only one in ten of you can hope to marry.” Today, this would mean the loss of one option among many for those young girls’ lives. At the time, it meant that they would never be able to fulfil the role they had been led all their lives to expect that they would fulfil, of being wives and mothers. With many professions closed to women, they faced what could in many cases have been a lifetime of struggle to support themselves.

This might seem as though I’m equating the dismay of those young girls with the horrible suffering of men who died in combat in the First and Second World Wars. That is not my intention. Rather, I suppose that I want to emphasise the fact that war is not something fought by young, heroic men in countries far away. It is a horror that affects all parts of society, from the men who fought and died, to the families left without husbands, brothers, sons and fathers. As PJ Harvey saw it, the bitter branches of war spread out into the world. 

At the top of the stairs in my parents’ house hangs a picture of my great-grandparents. My great-grandfather is in his army uniform, about to go abroad to fight in the First World War. His innocent eyes look out towards the camera. 

Unlike many families of the time, my great-grandfather, and later my grandfathers, returned from war. Unlike some of the men they fought with, they returned to have children and support their families as those children grew up. It is a chilling thought that, had the First and Second World Wars not happened, there could well be an entire generation of men and women walking amongst us, who did not exist because the men who could have been their fathers were killed before they had the chance to lead an ordinary life. 

Given the number of wars raging in the world, it would be easy to despair. However, after centuries of conflict, wars in mainland Europe have ceased. That’s not enough on its own, but it is a start. There is quite a lot of evidence to suggest that, very slowly, violence between human beings is starting to decline, and we can only hope that this will continue in the years to come. 

Perhaps, if we continue to remember our dead and the suffering war causes, we’ll continue to believe that peace is the only way forward.

Malta Day 1 – Accidents and Emergencies, Part the Fourth

 And indeed the Tugboat Rozi is a splendid wreck, one I’d really recommend to anyone. It’s mostly intact and has lots of fish, plus the cabin is open for that inevitable “diver sitting on a toilet underwater” photo that everyone likes to take. At one point my buddy spotted a barracuda in the distance. Best of all, I handled the depth, staying mostly relaxed and happy. I felt a little strange at one point, stopped, gently rose a metre or two, and it went away. Eventually, inevitably, our computers began to count down the minutes until we started to reach the ‘five minutes til you go into deco(1)’ moment. 

And this is where things went a wee bit wrong.

Firstly, the current. As we headed back towards our planned exit point, we encountered a strong current which kept pushing us back towards the ship. For most of us, this was an annoyance but not a serious problem; we dropped down slightly to get out of the worst of the current. (Currents tend to be strongest the nearer you get to the surface of the water.) 

Unfortunately, this was not an option for two of our number, who were running low on air and for whom dropping longer would have meant risking running too low. They stayed shallower to conserve air, and found themselves being pushed further and further backwards. My buddy, a Divemaster, noticed this, and slowed down to watch to see if they were okay. The rest of the group, alas, didn’t notice this and kept going. I did my best to keep my eyes on both the struggling two divers, my buddy, and the rest of the group, but eventually reached the point where the group had simply vanished into the blue.

The two running-low-on-air divers eventually appeared to decide to surface, and myself and my buddy tried to decide what to do next. We followed our compasses in the direction the group had taken, and eventually found ourselves near the exit point next to the lighthouse. (Again, props to the excellent maps in the "A Guide to Shore Diving the Maltese Islands" book by Peter Lemon – I saw several metal beams in the water near some rocks, and instantly recognised them from the drawing in the book as the wreckage which indicates you have found the exit.)

We looked up to see the waves crashing overhead. 6m down, the water wasn’t moving too much, but it was clearly a different story on the surface. We’d have to go around the rocky outcrop to the planned exit point at Suzie’s Pool, which, being more sheltered, would be much calmer.

I checked my air (a bit low but not dire), my computer (which was doing a safety stop for me), and my buddy. And then realised what my buddy was staring at…

(1) ‘Going into deco’ is divers’ shorthand for staying down either long enough or deep enough (or both) that you have to do a decompression stop. In other words, you have stayed under long enough that your body has absorbed so much nitrogen (from the compressed air divers breathe) that you cannot ascend directly to the surface without an unacceptable risk of getting the bends.

This is when the nitrogen dissolved in your body tissues “bubbles out” destructively on ascent, due to the decreased pressure as you ascend to shallower depths. “Bubbling out” happens on all dives, but if you have too large an amount of nitrogen in your tissues and / or you ascend too quickly, the bubbles are so large that instead of being safely transported through the bloodstream into the lungs and exhaled, they become trapped and damage your tissues and circulatory system.

When this has happened, you must do a decompression stop, where you ascend to a certain depth and stay there until you’ve exhaled sufficient of the nitrogen stuck in your system that you can ascend further without an unacceptable risk of getting the bends. This is a regular part of technical diving. Technical divers, however, carry extra gas and an entirely separate scuba breathing system with them, so that in the event of one of their sets of breathing gas failing, they can switch to the other and still safely carry out decompression. The extra gas is also calcuated to last for the length of the dive plus decompression stops and a safety margin. Finally, they carry diving computers which can calculate decompression stops based on the divers’ time and depth during the dive. 

Recreational divers, of which I am one, do not carry this amount of gear as it’s not needed for dives without decompression stops. (The extra gear for technical diving is expensive, heavy, needs much more maintenance, and you have to do a lot of training and learn extra skills before you can safely dive with it. Each diver makes their own choice about whether the extra time and expense is worth it for what they want to achieve when they dive.) This means that, should you have to do a decompression and you have problems with your breathing gear or run low on gas, you face the choice every diver plans to avoid: run out of gas or get the bends. Neither is desirable.

Malta Day 1 – Accidents and Emergencies, Part the Third

Spot the octopus!

We pored over the excellent dive book, planning our dive on the Tugboat Rozi, just off Cirkewwa Point. In my case, with a slight residual anxiety, although the BCD problem had been solved swiftly by one of the divemasters. C took one look at the valve, unscrewed it, fished out the rubber seal and gave it a clean. He then screwed the valve back together and popped down to Suzie’s pool to test it out. Result: one working BCD. I was happy about this, but was also somewhat mindful of the fact that a dive to a wreck which sits at 35m on the seabed isn’t a good place to lose buoyancy. Still, I had faith in C.


Just as well, since I was slightly nervous about this. I’ve recently been getting the scuba yips about diving deep, legacy of a unfortunate incident in the Farne Islands where I overbreathed my reg at 21m and nearly had a panic attack. My best guess is that I’m a little sensitive to the extra work and noise of breathing through the reg at depth. Even with the breathing resistance dialled down, air at 30m is four times as dense as air at the surface, creating extra resistance, and I think it’s that which gives me the yips. 

On the other hand, part of me really, really wanted to do the dive and prove I could do it (and that the ‘Deep Diver’ speciality card I hold isn’t just there to prop up a wobbly table). Malta is where you go to see wrecks, and I really wanted to see this one. And so, along with everyone else, I kitted up and trudged to the entrance point by the lighthouse. As I strapped on my fins and attempted to rinse out my mask in a nearby rock pool without having the tide snatch it out of my hands, I thought to myself, “Wow, that’s a fair way down”. 

Never mind. I stuck the reg in my mouth, inflated the BCD, took a few breath, and giant-strode off the edge to join the others. A quick exchange of hand-signals, and we breathed out, deflated our jackets, and sunk into the sea. At four metres, I tested the BCD with a quick puff of air to slow my descent, turned my head, and watched in happiness as the air failed to stream out of the valve. I kicked forward, then paused, and found myself hanging effortlessly in the water column. 

Problem solved. I set off after the others, keeping pace with my buddy and staying shallow to maximise bottom time. En route, I took a white balance reading from my slate; the camera worked just fine. Five minutes in, the wreck loomed slowly out of the blue, surrounded by fish. 

This was what I’m come to Malta for!

Malta Day 1 – Accidents and Emergencies, Part the Second

We descended gently, or in my case swiftly, to the bottom of the wall nearby and commenced exploring. This should have been a nice, gentle dive with lots of fish and interesting life on the wall to see. 

Except that I still couldn’t swim properly. It felt like I was being pulled downward. Fortunately, we weren’t near a drop-off, but I just couldn’t get buoyant. I filled my jacket, and filled my jacket, and then became aware of a deeply, deeply unwelcome sound behind my head. The sound of escaping air. 

Bugger.

I turned my head as far as I could, and there was the problem; a steady stream of leaking bubbles from the dump valve on my right shoulder. I swiftly signalled my buddy, indicated a problem, wrote on the slate “Leaking valve?” and pointed. My buddy shook her head, possibly because by this point all the air had leaked out and there was either no stream of bubbles, or a very small one. 

We continued our dive for five minutes with me hoping that my buddy was right. Alas, this was not the case. I was having to drag myself across the rocks. I checked my air; down to 110bar from a full 12-litre tank (230). I’d have expected to be at around 180-170 by now, given the depth. At this point, my oh-shit-ometer started going “BEEEEEP” as I stared down at the sea floor, 22m down, and had the deeply uncomfortable thought that if I sunk down to it I might not be able to get back up again on my own without ditching my weights. This was not an irretrievable situation, but it needed dealing with now. Time to end the dive.

I practised a skill I’ve come to realise recently I need more of, that of being assertive with my buddy. I resignalled “Problem”, pointed at the valve, then pointed at the SPG. My buddy, being familiar with my levels of air consumption, realised the problem. We swam off, or in my case lumbered off, to find the rest of the gang. Alas, everyone had swum off in front of us; always a fun situation when you can’t swim fast and you need to catch up to indicate a problem. Ten minutes later, I stationed myself on a rock, whilst my buddy attempted to get the divemasters’ attention. 

I managed to make eye contact with one of them (also, coincidentally, the same instructor who taught me on my Rescue Course). I signalled “Problem” and “Come here”, probably rather emphatically. I then printed on the slate “BCD VALVE LEAKING, CAN’T STAY BUOYANT”. We agreed to swim back together, ascending slowly to about six metres. At this depth the 5mm semidry suit plus the lighter tank and what little air I could keep in the BCD were enough to maintain buoyancy. 

We paddled slowly along, with me keeping a wary eye on my SPG, and trying not to think about the fact that I had no fine control over my buoyancy, and if I went to the surface, no means of keeping myself float apart from my ability to swim, and my semidry suit. (Orally inflating a leaking BCD being an exercise in pointlessness.) I thought about all the functions you need your dive gear to perform both during a routine dive and in an emergency, which you never realise you relying on it to be able to do unless for any reason it can’t do it. 

Nevertheless, we made it uneventfully back to the exit point and paddled back out, trying not to get knocked off our feet by the surf, which was getting up a wee bit. I shed my gear, waited for everyone else to emerge, and started planning a) lunch and b) what on earth I was going to do for the next dive.

Malta Day 1 – Accidents and Emergencies

Recently I spent eight days in Malta, courtesy of my friendly local dive shop, with ten fellow divers. We explored the island and drank much beer.

I'd like to point out that any bugger-ups recounted here are entirely my own fault. No blame attaches to anyone else! So, onward...

The Diving Holiday in Malta team’s first day was spent at Marfa Point, aka Cirkewwa. About an hour’s drive from St Peter’s Bay, it’s where the Gozo ferry leaves from, and also has several excellent dives in its own right. We had our trusty guide to Malta’s diving, penned by Peter Lemon, whom we bumped into in the Dive Shop later in the week. (I’m not being sponsored by him or anything, but if you want a guide to diving in Malta, buy his. It has excellent directions, including compass bearings, good descriptions, and undersea maps that actually make sense when you get under the water.)

Should have been a doddle of a check-out dive, following by an interesting dive on the wreck of the Tugboat Rozi, right? 

Well…

Our first dive was to be around the area known as “Suzie’s Pool”, an area often used for training dives, and thus a logical place to have our first “check-out” dive of the holiday. Always a good idea to test out everyone’s skills and equipment before the more challenging dives. In my case, it was going to be particularly useful, since I had with me my old BCD, which I now use for travelling. The new one is more up-to-date, comfortable and ergonomic, fits over my drysuit, has integrated weight pockets – and also weighs a ton, so it no longer comes with me on holiday unless I have extra baggage allowance. I’d had the old BCD serviced back in February, hadn’t used it since June, and had meant to have a pool dive with it the week before we left, but life got in the way.

I kitted up with 6kg of lead, figuring that since I was wearing the 5mm full-length suit of my two-piece semidry suit – but not the jacket, hood, neoprene socks, 5mm gloves or rash vest that complete the rest of my diving ensemble back in the UK – I could knock 3kg off what I needed. I’d been diving on 6kg in Crete earlier in the year with the same set-up. 

We slithered into Suzie’s Pool, in some cases literally as the sea was vigorously splashing onto the rocks* and swam out to the drop-off. Or in my case, didn’t, as I seemed to be pinned onto the rocks. I signalled my buddy and wrote on the slate I always carry with me: “Too much weight.” 

Looking back, this should have been a clue. Even if 6kg was a little on the heavy side taking into account the amount of neoprene I’d lost from my usual diving set-up, I’ve dived with that BCD on 9kg of lead and a lot more gear, and it can produce roughly 20kg-worth of lift. Even if I was over-weighted, it should have been possible to compensate by adding a bit more air to the jacket.

Still, buddy and the nearby dive leader fiddled about with my weight belt and removed a weight, always an interesting experience when all your weight is on your belt. Fortunately, with only 3 minutes’ dive time and 4m of water above my head, even a buoyant ascent would probably not have done me too much damage. Even more fortunately, this didn’t happen: the dive leader tucked the weight into his BCD pocket, and we set off into the blue.

And then things got worse. 


To be continued…


* Yes. This will become an important detail later on on this blog.

Things I Learned From Buying A Flat

1. If there’s anything else in life which you need to devote energy to, sort it out before you start the process of buying. Double if you’re buying and selling. Once the process starts, people will be calling you at any time with any question, usually whilst you’re at work, but sometimes in the evening. You’ll need your resources to sort this out. You may also like to warn your friends and family in advance that, temporarily, they are not your number one priority (unless their house burns down or something).  
2. Other people’s advice can be useful, but remember, this is YOUR home – not theirs. If you want to buy it and you’re not sure the seller will go for a lower price, ask if you’re prepared to risk losing the property for the sake of potentially saving a few thousand.  
3. This is not the time to be a shrinking violet. You are paying people – the solicitor, the surveyor, anyone you get in to fix the property – to do stuff for you on the biggest purchase you’ll ever make. Forget being polite and retiring and be prepared to be a pain in the bum if you need to. If all else fails, pretend you’ve turned into the most assertive person you know, and think about how they would handle it. 
4. Where the north-east isn’t riddled with underground streams, it’s riddled with disused mines, and many properties are leasehold flats, which are complex to sell. Don’t get the cheapest solicitor, get a GOOD solicitor who knows the area. 
5. If you’re not sure, ask, ask and ask again. If you don’t understand it, get them to explain it. If you’re not sure if the garden with the large dead yucca plant in belongs to the property you’re after, get the estate agent to find out. See point 1. 
6. The estate agent may push you to complete the sale so that they can get their fee. Be prepared to ignore this for as long as it takes to conduct as many checks on your potential new home as you require. 
7. Insurance, insurance, insurance. Don’t complete without it! (See aforementioned "House burning down" comment.) 
8. Buy a large bottle of wine and keep the number for a decent takeaway handy, you’ll need it for the first night. Also keep nightclothes, bedding, toiletries, towels, tea, coffee, biscuits, loo roll and lightbulbs handy.  
9. If people offer to help you move, accept the offer with joy, and go buy or make a big cake for them to eat whilst helping you move. Free help is great.
10. But do think about what you'd like them to do on the day, else you'll spend Moving Day with people crowding round you going "What do we do next?"
11. You may also like to lay in a bottle of Scotch for if either a) it all goes wrong, b) the central heating packs in - that's why the Scots invented it in the first place.

And Off I Go Again

To Malta, where it is sunny and warm and there are sunken ships, and I don't have to worry about the gathering clouds of DOOM over my office. See you when I return!

Things I Learned From My Last Dive (St Mary's Island)

Note: Lest it be thought otherwise, these are my own thoughts on what I learned from my last dive. It's not intended as a criticism of my dive buddies. I take the view that I'm personally responsible for my own dives and if something went wrong, I need to think about what I personally could have done differently to prevent it.

1. Never abdicate looking up the tides and currents to someone else, even if they’re a Divemaster and your internet connection isn’t working.  YOU'RE responsible for your safety, not them.
2. The handsignals for “You two stay together and wait here, I’ll go up and take a compass bearing” look disturbingly like the handsignals for “You two buddy up, I’m ascending and ending my dive”.  
3. If you don’t understand the message someone is conveying, don’t let them do anything until you do. Write it on the slate if you have to.  
4. In poor vis, agree with your buddies in advance that the dive moves at the pace of the slowest diver, and that the people leading will look back frequently to check that there are still the right number of people present.  
5. In poor vis, get close on descent, and hold hands (or a buddy line) on ascent to avoid getting split up. 
6. Never let the guy with the broken compass lead the dive. 
7. Always carry audio and visual signalling equipment. 
8. Spend time keeping your fitness up. My buddy and I had to surface swim for about 20 mins with a tide running. Every minute I’ve ever spent in the gym on the treadmill was worth it, because an unfit diver would have been struggling, and trying for a tow against a current is a difficult thing. 
9. On the North Sea coast, heading West will pretty much always get you back to the coast.

On the plus side, I faced my fear of overbreathing my reg at depth, and overcame it. We all got back in one piece. And as we surfaced, and I thought “Bugger me, that lighthouse is a long way off”, I saw the Red Arrows performing in the distance for the Great North Run, and the inspiration powered us back to the lighthouse, and a very welcome biscuit.

A Dude With A Shrub On His Head

I continue to attempt to move home. "Attempt" because I secretly have no clue how to do this properly, and am just making it up as I go along, in the hope that I will soon be in one place, with all my possessions, and with the lights, gas and electric all working.

Until then, when I may have time to write something, here's a picture of a man with a shrub on his head.

If Sherlock Holmes could have seen Newcastle City Centre, he would have congratulated himself on the accuracy of his observation that truth is always, always, stranger than anything you can make up (or words to that effect).

The Olympic Spirit

And here is the article I talked about last week. In other news, I own a flat. Still working on the "Home of CyclingDiver" sign to go beside the door!

Now that the Games have finished, what memories are we left with? Undoubtedly, we have seen some truly incredible feats of athleticism. No-one who saw Usain Bolt winning any of his three gold medals will forget the sight. As my best friend said to her young son before the 100m final: “You need to be looking at the television right now, and don’t blink or you’ll miss it!”. And you could say the same of Mo Farrah’s astonishing double gold in the 10,000m and 5000m races, Jessica Ennis’s victory in the women’s heptathlon, or Bradley Wiggins’ winning both the Tour de France and an Olympic time trial gold in the space of a few weeks? 

All physical feats that most human beings could never hope to match, yet perhaps what appeals most to us are the human stories behind each triumph. Experts in the field of cycling will no doubt rave over Bradley Wiggins’ remarkable achievement, but who among us, regardless of how ignorant we are of cycling, could fail to be moved by the fact that his first action, on learning he’d won the gold, was to get back onto his bike and go in search of his wife and children? Or any of the following moments:

• Gemma Gibbons’ reaction to winning the silver medal in the women’s 78kg class judo, tearfully mouthing “I love you, Mum”, in memory of her dead mother.  
• Mo Farrah, a Somalia-born immigrant to the UK, being cheered onto two gold medals by the British public before the eyes of the world. 
• Kathie Copeland’s incredulous comment to her rowing partner Sophie Hosking on winning the women’s lightweight double sculls: “We’re going to be on a stamp!” 
• Andy Murray defeating Roger Federer to win the gold at the same place where he had lost the Wimbledon final to Federer four weeks ago, sprinting to the player’s box to celebrate with his friends and family after defeating Roger Federer – then reaching out to hug a young fan.

These stories (and the many, many more that could be added to them after the last two weeks) are not unique to these Games. Earlier games too saw human beings transcend nationality and even race to offer each other a hand of friendship and support. Most people have seen the “Black Power” salute at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, performed by John Carlos and Tommie Smith, but how many know that the gloves they were wearing actually belonged to Peter Norman, the third athlete on the podium? Norman, a supporter of civil rights (he is wearing a civil rights badge in the photograph), saw that they had forgotten their gloves. He approached and offered them his gloves to wear. (38 years later, Carlos and Smith were pallbearers at Norman’s funeral.) 

One final story, this one from the famous, or perhaps notorious, 1936 Berlin Olympics. Most of us have heard of Jesse Owens, the famous African-American athlete whose four gold medals, won in front of the Nazi regime, demonstrated the hollowness of the racist Nazi ideology. Fewer have heard of Luz Long, the German athlete and national hero who competed with Owen in the long jump. 

During the competition, Long noticed that Owen was struggling during the qualifying rounds for the long jump. He walked across and suggested that Owen try an adjustment to his technique. Owen took his advice, and went on to win the gold medal in the event – at which point he and Long embraced and walked arm-in-arm to the dressing room, posing for photos together. 

Owen said afterwards: “You can melt down all the medals and cups I have and they wouldn't be a plating on the 24-carat friendship I felt for Luz Long at that moment. Hitler must have gone crazy watching us embrace."

Still Writing My Post

I've been spending the week trying to write a post about "The Olympic Spirit", which is actually an article I want to put in my church newsletter. This has been somewhat held up by office moves, house moves (I hope - haven't yet exchanged contracts!), and my in retrospect poor decision to slug five glasses of wine last night in Perdu. Actually, I don't regret that last one. Screw it!

To hold you between now and then, here's a picture of an unexploded WWII bomb under the water, which I saw in Crete. More actual writing coming soon.

Vertical Ships, Idiot Bartenders, and McBob (Oban Diving) – Digression

And we rose early in the morning, and hopped into J’s Jaguar to head on down to Oban Harbour, and load all of our gear onto our floating base for the day, the Peregrine. This is one way in which diving in Britain differs from diving overseas, at least in my experience. Just about all types of diving involve early starts, but diving in Britain usually involves hauling a lot more heavy gear about, due to a) absence of paid friendly divemasters to do it for you, and b) diving in Britain requires a lot more stuff. It’s no wonder I’ve started lifting heavier weights at the gym. 

Interestingly enough, I recently realised that perhaps part of the reason why of all the hobbies I’ve tried – martial arts and archery included – diving is the one that’s stuck; it plays to my physical strengths. Partly, it’s just that I love the water. I literally cannot remember a time I couldn’t swim, as I was first taken to a swimming pool by my dad before I was one year old – my conscious memory doesn’t get back far enough! 

Curiously enough, you don’t actually have to be a great swimmer to be a diver*, although it certainly helps. Most divers don’t need to master anything other than the basic flutter kick, which is the same one used in front crawl, and the fins do the rest. (It’s different for techie divers, who need to have very precise fin strokes to avoid stirring up silt in caves and wrecks.) You do, however, need to be confident being in water, and swimming certainly helps. Bobbing around in the middle of the North Sea in three-foot waves waiting for the boat to find you and pick you up really isn’t the right time to be at all nervous about being in deep water. 

Getting back to my point, the one thing I physically lack is speed. I can run. I just can’t run fast. This is affectionally known in my family as the “Curse of the CylingDiverClan”**. None of us have any acceleration, although quite a few of us have done half-marathons and fun runs. Alas, nearly all school sports require the ability to run really fast, and hence my school sports career was best described as undistinguished. I can, however, hit my stride and stay in it for some time. 

Since diving requires you to actively avoid doing things fast – it wastes energy and leads to inefficient breathing – but does require continous exertion over a period of around 40 minutes, it’s perfect for me. My fondness for lifting large lumps of metal helps out too. Being able to squat-thrust 30kg in the gym is great preparation for standing up with 13kg of lead strapped around you, and a 12litre tank of steel and compressed air on your back adding another 15kg to play with. 

Standing up with all of that on you on a boat is an interesting experience, and one I was about to have. More details on that, and the afore-mentioned McBob, next week!


* This is one of the Big Three questions I get asked when people learn I go diving. The other two, which nearly always follow when people learn I go diving in Britain, are:

“Don’t you get cold?” Polite answer: “No, not if you’re wearing the right type of suit to go diving in.” Honest answer: “Would you enjoy being cold for half an hour? Do you think I’d enjoy being cold for half an hour every weekend when I could be doing something else? Ergo, do you think I get cold?”

“Can you see anything?” Polite answer: “Yes, it’s possible to see quite a lot. We can get up to 10m visibility, and there are lots of starfish, crabs, fish and anemones to look at, plus the seals and the wrecked ships.” Honest answer: “No, I love spending half an hour swimming around in the murk looking at nothing.” Though, to be fair, that’s a good description of one or two dives I’ve had at Beadnell Bay, and don’t get me started on Lake Ellerton.


I know, I’m irritable. I used to get deeply irritated when I did martial arts and people would say to me, on learning that this was my hobby: “Ooh, I won’t disagree with you then!” I used to want to reply: “What, you seriously think I’m so violent I’d hit you if you disagreed with me?” I guess one of the great lessons of life I’ve had to learn in the past thirty-odd years is People Like To Make Obvious Comments, and nobody ever, ever, thinks if you might have heard the same thing before and be fed up with answering it.



** No, that is not our real surname. Though it would be pretty awesome if it were.

The Bells! The Bells!

Well, this was going to be another post about diving. But I do other things too, and one of those things on Friday was to mount my bicycle and set forth at an hour earlier than I am accustomed to leaving my home on a weekday, to go and ring a bell and herald the arrival of the Olympics. 

The best reason I can give for doing this was “It seems a shame not to join in”. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, I was ringing a bell as part of Martin Creed’s mass art project, “Work No 1197. All The Bells In A Country Rung As Quickly And As Loudly As Possible For Three Minutes.” I saw an article about it on the Thursday, thought, “Ah, hang on, I meant to find out about that”. A quick Google later, and it turned out that Arts Council North East were taking part. 

I arrived at their rather nice office (far better than the Civic – it has hot water and heating and everything) at the back of Central Station on a sunny morning, locked the bike to the nearest railing, and trotted indoors. A motley collection of bells lay on a table, surrounded by twenty people with that mixture of embarassment and good cheer that the British exhibit when asked to do anything communal in public. 

We trotted on out, and I unlocked the bike and wheeled it round. I have a rather good bike bell as it has that unmistakeable “bring bring!” sound everyone associates with a bike. (Hence why I have it – I like a bell that says to people: “Bike!”. I have flashing lights for the same reason.) I thought it would be rather nice to include a bicycle, even if it did mean I had to lug the bike around with me whilst everyone else held a dainty bell. Except for the organiser, Bill, who had enterprisingly made his own bell from a tin can with a hole in and one end taken off, a piece of string and a washer. 

We stood in the sunshine and listened intently to the radio, then when the signal went at 8.12am it was all go. Amazingly, the motley collection of bells blended together into a charming melody, although one china bell was rung so hard it cracked! People trotted around taking photos with one hand and dinging valiantly away with the other, and even a passing train driver joined in on his horn. We made it onto Radio Newcastle, so if you were listening, the bicycle bell was me – I haven’t rung it so much since I nearly got run over by a lorry. 

As it finished, we smiled at each other and went indoors for tea and bacon sandwiches.

Back from Crete

Crete was awesome. (I don't make a point of saying where I'm going before I go there online, on the paranoid grounds of not actually advertising to random e-strangers I'll be away from my home.)

But it was awesome. There were octopodes, moray eels, and seahorses. Here's a picture of one, and there will be a blog post soon!

Vertical Ships, Idiot Bartenders, and McBob, Part the First (Oban Diving)

Back in May, I enjoyed a trip to Oban with the Diving Centre Newcastle. This was, as previously mentioned, the trip which finally persuaded me to spend a ridiculously large amount of money on a drysuit. But, I get ahead of myself…

It takes about five hours to get to Oban, but fortunately myself, B and A (two of my regular diving pals) had managed to stick to the old saying about long-distance car journeys, “Always get the person with the fanciest car to do the driving”. At 10.30am on a Friday, therefore, I found myself in the front seat of J’s Jaguar, trucking up up the Carlisle road to Hexham to the tune of “I’m Coming Home, Newcastle.” (Always fun if one of you in the car happens to be a Mackem.)

The drive may be long, but what it lacks in shortness it certainly makes up for in scenery. The scenery on the way past Loch Lomond is stunning. I’m not sure whether it’s my partly-Scottish blood, but part of me looks at Scotland and thinks, “Yes, this is what scenery ought to look like, with the gnarled trees and the moss and the hills and the tumbling burns and everything”. It was gorgeous and, fortunately, so was the weather. 

We arrived at the Puffin Dive Centre in time to have a quick shakedown dive off the shore, in which I made the highly unwelcome discovery that my camera battery was flat. Deeply annoying, as, despite what some people thought, I found it was quite a pleasant dive with a lot to see. Plenty of scallops and hermit crabs, a few small fish, some interesting old bottles (apparently it used to be a Navy base, and this is where they would throw the rubbish in the sea), and I spotted an interesting white nudibranch which I would have loved to take a photo of. Oh well. 

We headed back to our little cottage in time to have a shower, and for me to make the highly, highly, unwelcome discovery that I hadn’t brought either the spare camera battery or the charger cable. Regretting yet again that I’d managed to buy a camera which doesn’t take standard batteries, I climbed into the taxi, to be greeted by the question “Are you Mary?” from the taxi driver. I explained that no, I was not Mary and indeed none of us were. The taxi driver expressed puzzlement, until we explained that one of us is in fact called Barry.

Needless to say*, he was known as “Mary” for the rest of the trip.

We headed into town to a rather nice pub. Oban is a surprisingly large town. Surprising in the sense that you head along some very small and sparsely-populated roads, then suddenly you drop down into Oban, and it’s actually quite a large place. I would happily spend more time there; I feel a cycling trip along the Campeltown – Oban national cycle route coming on… Back on the diving trip, we ordered our pints and fish and chips, and settled in to talk diving and enjoy a few rounds. The evening was marred only by a bartender who insisted that we hadn’t paid. We insisted that we had paid, because we had. Eventually the manager stepped in and pointed out that two of us had moved tables, so the bartender had got the payments mixed up, and calm was restored. We wandered around Oban a little more, then went to bed to get some sleep ahead of Day 2. Vertical wrecks ahoy!


* if you’re familiar with most divers’ sense of humour.

The Wonderful World of Drysuits

Well, I finally took the plunge. (Sorry.) I have bought myself a drysuit. For those who know nothing about what that is, it’s a watertight fabric suit with built-in boots and rubber seals at the neck and wrists to keep water out. You wear it whilst diving, with a warm undergarment underneath it, and it keeps you a lot warmer than a wetsuit or semidry suit - air is a less efficient conductor of heat, and thus a much better insulator than water. 

Given that cold has been a limiting factor on most of my dives, you might wonder why I’ve never bought one before. Answer: they’re expensive. The drysuit itself, plus its undersuit, hose to attach it to the air tank (the suit is inflated at depth from the scuba tank, to stop it being compressed by the increased water pressure), and the training course to teach me to use it safely, cost £500. Had I bought it from a slightly less nice dive shop, i.e. one that didn’t chuck in the hose and undersuit along with the drysuit, it would have been more. 

Alas, this was but the start of my expenditure. My semidry fins are too small to fit the bigger drysuit boots, so it was off to Deep Blue Dive to buy a pair two sizes bigger, and thus spend another £99 plus £2 for a beeswax stick to grease the drysuit zip and stop it sticking. 

And finally, my old buoyancy jacket is too small to fit properly over the drysuit, so it’s a new BCD for me, at the cost of £360. Yes, it has occurred to me that I could have gone on a week’s holiday for the amount I’ve just spent on dive gear. 

On the other hand, it was more than worth it to be able to do two dives in the Farne Islands, including the sitting about on the boat afterwards, and not be cold at all. I had not realised how much of my energy was being taken up on my dives by managing my responses to the cold. I saw far more on the dives than I usually do, simply because I’m not continually trying to win the mental battle against the cold. Much safer and much, much more fun. Never again will I feel my dives cut short by the cold. 

Also, the new BCD is fantastic. I’m not on commission, but it’s an Oceanic Hera, specially designed for women, and the joy of a BCD which fits properly and doesn’t make me feel like I’m being hugged by a boa constrictor when I inflate it fully. It has integrated weights*, and for a few moments on the boat, as I loaded in my integrated weight pockets and zipped up the drysuit, I felt like a proper diver. 

Until I realised that the reason the regulator wouldn’t screw onto the top of the scuba tank is because I’d forgotten to take the tank valve cap off. Oops.


* weight pockets inside the buoyancy jacket. Preferable to the old-fashioned system of wearing all your weight on your weight belt, as it distributes the weight across your body. It also means that if you have to dump weight, you have the option not to ditch all your weights, an action known as “doing a Polaris ascent”, since ditching all your weights tends to result in sudden positive buoyancy and rocketing up to the surface, probably giving yourself the bends or an arterial gas embolism (every bit as nasty as it sounds) on the way. Instead, you can ditch either your weight belt or your weight pockets, giving a bit more control over the ascent.

Seal Soup, Part the Second (Dive at the Farne Islands)

Eventually the site was settled upon, and myself plus buddy (J) fell backwards off the boat and into the water. I spent the next ten minutes trying to equalise my right ear, which was really playing up – always fun when you’re trying to keep track of everyone else. Eventually, at the point where I was thinking of giving up, after much jiggling and swallowing, it slowly cleared with a squeak and I dropped down to my buddies’ level to play with seals. 

They were everywhere. It was the first time I’d had seals come up to me and play, or let me stroke their heads. J was in his element, since his definition of the perfect dive is probably something like “Interesting stuff to photograph + seals to play with”. I took a few photos too, one of which was sufficiently good that I later entered it into the Stoney Cove photo competition and won a new torch.  (Not the one above, although I quite liked that one too!)

We paddled merrily along following our dive leader, who was towing an inflatable surface buoy at the request of the skipper, who was concerned about us getting caught in the current. So concerned that he dispatched another diver to inform us that we were getting a bit too close to the edge of the island, where the currents can sweep you round the side if you’re not careful. 

We turned around, J and I bringing up the rear with cameras at the ready, and seals nibbling our fins. All apart from one seal, which thought the inflatable surface buoy was the best toy it had ever seen, and decided to hang upside down from it and be towed along. J and I did a quick exchange of hand signals and expressions, which would translate roughly into English as:

Me: “Shall we tell him about the seal?”
J: “No, let’s watch, point and laugh.” 

We did, waiting for the inevitable moment when the dive leader would realise why he wasn’t making much progress. I wasn’t close enough to hear his response (and I was too busy laughing into the regulator anyway), but I’m guessing from his expression it was “Fucking seal”.

As we reached the end of the island, we ascended gently and rejoined the boat for some tea and buns. The buns were provided by me – they usually are. 

The second dive was also fun, and cold. It was around this point I decided that it was time I started to think about getting a drysuit. (Though I did not in fact get one until half a year later, after my trip to Oban. More about that later.) Diving along a reef covered in soft corals with a seal nibbling your fins and a couple of ballan wrasse dancing in front of you should be a pleasure, not an exercise in how long you can endure the cold before you tap your buddy’s shoulder and signal to end the dive. It’s also not fair on the drysuit-wearing buddy, who has to terminate their dives earlier than they actually need to, since they’re not getting cold. 

Even so, it was a fun dive. We surfaced and scrambled back into the boat. I needed to be yoicked on by two of the other divers; dignity is not a big part of diving. Once all were safely back aboard, we made as fast a run as possible to get back land. I remember thinking “That was great, and I am now done for the season”. Great dives, but tough and tiring. (It took two days for my back to recover from the pounding we all took as the Moby hammered through the waves back to Beadnell.) 

Sill, I got a torch out of it.

Seal Soup (Dive at the Farne Islands Last Year)

Here's an account of a dive I did last year - one of my favourites to date. In other news, I've recently purchased a drysuit, and will be taking it out for a spin tomorrow. Updates as and when...
When the skipper of the boat begins the safety briefing with “Right, grab something in the middle and hold on tight, ‘cos Alton Towers has got nothing on this!”, you know it’ll be an interesting day’s diving.

It started with a demonstration of Murphy’s Law. I’d got up early especially to get to the Farnes by 8am, as I always seem to start my dives up there with rushing frantically to be on time. I was the second one there, just in time to find out that the boat would be leaving later than usual because the tide wasn’t in far enough to be able to launch the boat without getting stuck on the rocks. Such be life.

Eventually, we got the nod from the skipper, kitted up and loaded the boat, and escorted the Moby down to the water. Diving from a RIB from Beadnell is always an interesting experience, as the tractor drags the boat into the water, then everyone makes an undignified scramble over the side and into the boat. We perched on the sides, and hung on for grim life as the skipper turned the boat to face the waves. 

He was right. I have dived from the Moby on several occasions, but this was by far the bumpiest ride I’ve ever had out there. At one point I looked at the prow of the boat as it headed into a wave at a perilious angle (think of that publicity shot for “The Perfect Storm”, and you’re getting there), realised that I could see only walls of grey North Sea water on either side, and thought “Oh shit". At times like this, as the boat tips up one side of the wave and then suddenly drops down the other, I find it helps to have blind faith in the person driving the boat. Rationality isn’t really high on the agenda. 

Eventually, we bumped and surfed our way out of Beadnell harbour, and headed to the Farne Islands, where we spent a fair amount of time pootling around trying to find a site that was actually going to be safe to jump over the side into. The waves were not making this easy. Naturally, it was at this moment that I remembered I’d forgotten to bring my SMB and reel, and spent five minutes mentally kicking myself for being a crap Rescue Diver.

We debated the merits of a dive in what was soon dubbed Seal Lagoon, behind the lighthouse, and decided that whilst playing with seals would be fun, 4m was a little too shallow. On the plus side, we did get to watch the seals from close up, many of whom wriggled into the waters and swam over to peer curiously at us. (Apart from Dad Seal, who lay regally on a rock, regarding us with a baleful eye.)

To be continued...

The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Polling Stations

Earlier in May, I was yet again wielding the mightly 30cm Plastic Ruler of Democracy, as a Presiding Offier at a polling station for the local election and the mayoral referendum. It inspired this, which I call the Curmudgeon's Guide to Polling Stations, aka "Advice for Voters".

 

• You will usually see two people behind the desk. One will have books of ballot papers in front of them. Approach the other, who will usually be seated nearest the door, and have a set of names and addresses in front of them. This is the Poll Clerk, with the electoral register.  
• If you don’t have your poll card with you, introduce yourself the wrong way round! Most people give their name first, then their house number, then their street. The register lists streets alphabetically, then house numbers, then names. Give the street first, then your house number, then your name, and the Poll Clerk will find you a lot faster. 
• (NB you do NOT need your poll card to vote unless you have an anonymous entry on the register. If anyone tells you otherwise, they are wrong. Nor do you need proof of identity.) 
• If the Poll Clerk reads out a funny number, it relates neither to their getting your house number or your age wrong. This is your elector number, which the other person – the Presiding Officer – needs to record that you have been issued a ballot paper. Incidentally, the Presiding Officer (usually issuing the ballot papers) is in charge of the polling station – don’t be fooled by the fact that they are not the one greeting you! 
• You have the right to ask for help. You can have a magnifying glass, a tactile voting device if you have very poor vision, assistance from the Presiding Officer or Poll Clerk if you don’t understand what’s on the ballot paper, or you can take a companion into the booth with you (they will need to sign a simple form to say that they have assisted you), and you can come back later if you want to take more time to think about it. 
• The one thing the staff cannot do is tell you how to vote. That’s up to you.
• You have the right to vote if you have a ballot paper in your hand by 10pm. If you don’t, you can’t. If you disagree, write to your MP pronto and ask for a change in the law. 
• Staff eating pasta salads or reading the paper whilst sat at the polling desk reflects not a lack of professionalism, but the fact that they are there from 6.30am to 10.15pm without a break. Yes. WITHOUT A BREAK. 
• If the staff sound like robots, please bear in mind the following: a) they are not ALLOWED to give opinions on any of the issues being decided, the candidates, or the parties involved, lest they be accused of influencing voters, b) after the first 50 or so voters, they will have said “Yes, it is quite warm in here”, “Yes, it is quite a long day”, “It’s been quite busy” about 50 or so times. Repeat as required throughout the day – EVERYONE asks the same questions! 
• Please refrain from abusing the fact that the polling station staff are not legally allowed to leave the polling station to lurk by the desk and buttonhole them with your personal views about the local area, the local councillor, or the local council. They can’t respond, and they very probably aren’t from the local area anyway. (Personally I have some sympathy for lonely older people who are taking their best chance of the day to have a conversation with someone. Everyone else will be very politely requested to leave my polling station as soon as is decently possible.)

Leeds Day 4, Part the Second: The First Sign of Madness is Suggs Streaking on the Stage

And the festival continued, though by now both festivalgoers and the site itself were looking more than slightly worn around the edges. Luckily, we had the final shift of the day, so were free to go and see some of the acts. A and I plonked ourselves by the main stage, where we were treated to Seasick Steve, and Madness. Seasick Steve was great, lifting a bottle of Thunderbird wine aloft, pronouncing “Don’t think a grape ever got near any of this shit", then beginning his ode to Thunderbird before being interrupted by a streaker who bore a remarkable resemblance to Suggs from Madness. He began with his modesty protected only by an inflatable ball, before flinging said ball into the audience and dashing offstage again. Seasick Steve smiled into his beard, and continued the song. 

We were later treated to Madness themselves, and the sight of a thousand-odd people nutty-dancing to “Baggy Trousers” was indeed one to behold. The memory sustained us through a long shift. The end shift on the Sunday is always a bit of an experience, as by this point both the drinks and the cash are running out (the bar company reasoning that they may as well run the stocks down, and also that people who are desperate for a drink will buy anything once they’ve fought their way through a 20-minute queue to get to the bar). We slogged our way onward. 

I was hoping for a quiet shift, but it didn’t turn out that way. The bar was absolutely slammed all shift, meaning that the most we saw of the Strokes was a faint background sound of “Last Night” over the hubbub of the crowd demanding pints of lager (and being disappointed). 

Luckily, Pulp made up for it all. Alas, we didn’t get to see as much of them as we’d hoped, but we did hear all the hits. Towards the end, we started visually hinting to people that the bar was closing by the subtle means of dropping the covers down over sections of it, starting at the edges and working inwards. Anyone taking time-lapse photography would have seen the increasingly excited bar staff being slowly squashed into the centre of the bar. The excitement increased in proportion to how well we knew the songs, until by the finale of “Common People”, we were all squashed into a space about fifteen feet wide and jumping up and down like loons. Definitely a festival highlight. 

Our bar manager kindly handed out a few drinks, and with that we were off to see the festival (and eat a stone-baked pizza) one last time. We rejoined C, who’d swapped his shift in order to see “Rise Against”, who were playing in the afternoon. Truth be told, there wasn’t much to see, apart from drunks, so after we’d eaten our pizza and drunk our drinks vouchers, we wended our way slowly homewards to the party in the Village Bar. The drink flowed, the chips were nibbled, and everyone joined in the chorus to “I Wanna Be Sedated”. As we trekked our way across the abandoned campsite the following morning to catch the National Express home, fun had indeed been had, and I’d achieved a small goal of FINALLY seeing Pulp live. A good festival indeed.

Been Taking the High Road

Well, I spen two consecutive weekends in Scotland, one cycling, one diving. Both were fantastic and will be posted about in detail later.

For now, I will merely add that it's taken a week to recover and get everything cleaned, washed, repaired and put away. And I am now off to bed!

Leeds 2011 Day 4: Na Na Na (Na Na Na, Na Na Na, Na Na Na)

Leeds 2006

As we wandered out into the Sunday morning sunshine, reflecting happily on the previous day's fun and digesting the canteen's oddly tasteles porridge, I thought back once more to Leeds 2006. Annoyingly in retrospect, I could have seen My Chemical Romance live for the first time (first time for me that is) at Leeds 2006. It was very shortly after this I really got into them. 

At the time, however, they hadn’t really registered on my radar. As was famously the case, they had to play after Slayer, on the “hard rock” day of the festival. I seem to remember Mastodon were the opening act, followed by Killswitch Engage – after that, it was all just noise to me. (Just checked: the others were Bullet for My Valentine, Less Than Jake, and Taking Back Sunday).

With the exception of Slayer, who were on at the end of our shift; we’d got the 12-6pm on the Friday. I seem to remember thinking “Hey, these guys can actually play!”. I’m old-fashioned; I like my music to have identifiable tunes and words. So did most of the team, and the aural battering we took over the course of the shift, combined with huge queues, malfunctioning MDUs, and a manager who seemed hellbent on off everyone on the bar, and it was one of the least fun shifts I’ve ever done in six years volunteering for the Workers Beer Company. (I seem to remember Killswitch Engage’s frontman yelling “You guys fucking suck!” at the crowd, and thinking “Yeah, we’re thinking that right back at you”.) 

As the end of the shift approached, we sidled to the back of the bar, ready to make a quick exit, and bumped into the team coming on shift. They were staring at the front of the bar, eyes wide in shock.  

We turned to see what they were looking at, and realised that the queues of, black-clad, dirty, tattooed metallers were about ten deep, and they were still coming. When you’re at the front of the bar, you don’t see this. You just appear in front of one customer, get the order, give them the drinks, get the money, go tot the next customer, same thing again, lather, rinse, repeat ad nauseum. At the back of the bar, though, the oncoming hordes were clearly visible. It was like being in Shaun of the Dead without a cricket bat. 

I’d liked to say we muttered some comforting words and patted their shoulders. In reality, it was more like we grinned evilly, muttered “See ya! Wouldn’t wanna be ya!”, grabbed a six-pint holder of cider each (this was before the WBC really cracked down on servers helping themselves to free booze – these days you’d get fired for it, and technically back then we weren’t supposed to do it, but after that shift, I was really not inclined to stop my guys helping themselves to drinks, not least because I badly needed one myself), and scarpered as fast as we could.

We paused briefly to ask each other “Do we want to stay in the main arena?”. The answer was “Nope, can’t take any more of this racket”, and we skittled off in search of the NME tent and better music. And that is the tale of How I Didn’t See My Chemical Romance At Leeds 2006.

Day 6 and Day 7: “She Stars in Her Own Private Movie”

Sunday, Day 6, 3pm, Come On Eng-ur-land
3pm found me trying to cram myself into an entirely over-occupied bar so that I could see a tiny corner of a fuzzy screen displaying the England vs. Germany match. It was so full any more people would have had to swing from the rafters, and the fire safety signs should more accurately have read “IF THERE IS A FIRE, THIS IS WHERE PEOPLE WILL BE TRAMPLED UNDERFOOT IN THE STAMPEDE”. I realised that I was basically being a lemming, and headed off in search of something more fun to do, like have a sit-down and a cider.


Monday, Day 7, 4pm, on the coach
A Team Leader’s role is never done. Not until everyone steps off the coach or the train in Newcastle. Admittedly, this time around I wasn’t really a team leader, since my “team” consisted of me and N, who was more than capable of looking after himself. Indeed, I think the reason I enjoyed this year’s festival so much was because I wasn’t having to look after people for once. Co-ordinating six people to turn up to their shifts at the Glastonbury festival, all of whom want to run off and do their own thing, is not unakin to herding cats (although in fairness, I have a beautiful beaded purse at home that last year’s Glastonbury team bought me as a thank-you for doing all the organising). 

Still, of the five of us I was the only one who had been to Glastonbury and volunteered with the Workers Beer Company before, and old habits die hard. Like many people on the coach, our epic journey home would not end with our stepping off the WBC coach in Leeds; that was just the end of stage 1. Had the coach left at 12noon as scheduled, we’d have been late home in Newcastle, but we’d still have had plenty of time to get up to Leeds Railway Station and get the train home. As it was, we were seriously beginning to wonder if we’d make the connection.

I busied myself on my phone, contacting National Rail Enquiries to check the times of the last trains home, and ringing my brother to let him know that there might be people he didn’t know crashing on the floor of our parents’ house. (My family lives near Leeds.) I didn’t really think that we’d need to do that, but being insanely helpful and over-prepared is one of my characteristics, and I was if I was going to stop now. After that, I leaned my head against the window, sighed, and tried to fall asleep. 


Sunday, Day 6, 4.45pm, inside the Avalon Tent – “There Are People In Here!”

My crowd-slipping-into skills got a workout, as I made my way inside the Avalon Tent to hear Keane play. It was so full there were people standing outside. I suspect this is not surprising, since if you picture Keane’s fans and England football fans, there probably isn’t a massive overlap, although as we stood there shifting our weight from foot to foot and waiting for the band to come on, quite a few people were checking their phones and putting them away with exclamations of disgust. (England were roundly beaten by Germany.) The band were late coming on. I wish I’d gone with my inner raconteur and yelled “Come on, stop watching the footie!” at the stage. 

Eventually the band walked out, led by Tom Chaplin who started at the sight of the tent and exclaimed with seemingly genuine surprise: “Fuck me, there are people in here! We thought we’d be playing to an empty tent”. They were clearly thrilled at the sight of the crowd, all of whom were definitely in the mood for a happy sing-a-long in the sunshine, and joined in the choruses of “Somewhere Only We Know” and “Everybody’s Changing” with great gusto. The band covered “With Or Without You” as a tribute to U2, and it was a very happy gig. You can always tell when a band is having a good time on stage, and Keane were clearly enjoying themselves, so much so that the NME reported afterwards in their write-up of the Sunday: “Either we’re having delusions, or Keane have just persuaded several hundred people that they’re one of Britain’s best-loved bands”.

It turned out that I was wrong about them being delayed by watching the footie. As they left the stage, Tom Chaplin paused and called out: “Hang on, what was the score? 4-1 to Germany? Oh well, it’s just as well that I don’t give a fuck then, isn’t it?” We all laughed. It was great to be so close to the band; the last time I saw them live (2005), they were several hundred feet away on the Pyramid Stage. Definitely one of my highlights of the festival.


Monday, Day 7, 5pm, Service Station
The coach paused for the driver to have a break. The overheated,grumpy inhabitants decanted themselves into the service station in search of rehydration and, in some cases, a quick fag. 

My bedraggled team glumly checked the National Rail Enquiries hotline to discover whether we could actually get home that evening. Answer: yes, if we got to Leeds in time to get the train to York, that connected with the final train to Newcastle of the day. Oh joy.

Whilst lying about on the grass near the coach waiting for the driver to return, we caught up with our foul-mouthed friend from the journey down (remember him?) who let us in on the fact that the coach had actually been stuck in the car park at noon, but without a pass it couldn’t enter the site to pick us up. (Access to Glastonbury is really, really strict.) Why exactly no-one had suggested we simply walked up to meet it is a mystery for the ages. 


Sunday, Day 6, 6pm, Glastonbury
I went for a final wander around, aware this was the last time I’d be seeing the festival in daylight since our shift would finish long after the sun had set. 


Monday, Day 7, 8pm, Outside Leeds Bus Station
8pm, hours after we’d expected to get home to Newcastle. It was chucking it down. We hailed a taxi and crammed ourselves plus our luggage into it, then hastened to the railway station. 

Sunday, Day 6, 8pm, Glastonbury – “Everyone Danced”

And we were back in the bar again, for our final shift. Heads down to get it over with… It’s not much fun spending your final evening at the festival behind the bar, particularly since by this point we’re usually running out of both change and the most popular drinks, but someone has to. We arrived ten minutes late due to the crowds, but got away with it. 

Fortunately for me, the Sunday headliner was Stevie Wonder. Let it not be said that I don’t like Stevie Wonder. Nobody doesn’t like Stevie Wonder. Yet, at the same time, given the choice… he was the headliner I would have been prepared to miss.

So we settled in behind the bar on a sunny evening. And to quote a popular slogan, “Possibly the best live bar background music in the world”. We had Shakira… and then we had Stevie Wonder.

You can tell when the headline act is good, because the bar goes quiet. This went quiet. Then it went noisy, because everyone knows the words, and everyone joins in. By the time we got to “Superstition”, all the punters were dancing. The people in the field beyond were dancing. The person next to me was dancing. I looked around, and realised: every single person in the bar and outside it, from the station supervisors to the manager, was dancing to Stevie Wonder singing “Superstition”. And yes, I was dancing too.

  

Monday, Day 7, 9pm, Leeds Railway Station
We glumly contemplated the timetable. Our only chance was to go to York, then change for Newcastle. We’d be getting the last trains all the way, so here went nothing, hoping hard that we wouldn’t get stranded.

Sunday Day 6 / Monday, Day 7, 2am, Glastonbury – Shall We Wander?

And the shift finally finished. N and I decided to go explore the festival. This is a perfectly rational decision to make at 2am on the final day of the Glastonbury festival, as it never really stops. (I’ve read that each year Michael Eavis has to round up about a dozen people who haven’t accepted – or possibly haven’t realised – that the festival is over, and put them on the next train home). We stopped off for some pancakes, then wandered around staring at interesting things. There was a lot going on, despite the fact it was pitch black and cold, despite the day’s weather. (As the NME commented on a photo they took at the Stone Circle: “If you look closely, you can see that these people are wearing every stitch of clothing they’ve brought with them. Seriously, the Sahara Desert by day, the fucking Ice Age by night.”)

We stopped in a tent for a drink, then a woman in a turquoise taffeta ballgown wandered onstage and started singing Britney Spears’ “Toxic” in the style of George Formby whilst accompanying herself on the ukelele, so we stayed for a bit longer.

After this, we strolled around to take in any bits of the festival we hadn’t seen yet. We made it to Trash City, which I’ve always wanted to see at night – it’s really a bit pointless seeing it in daytime. It was lively, but not our scene, so we strolled slowly back down the old railroad path to the WBC village, dodging happy drunks and people falling about in costumes in the glare of the overhead floodlights. Eventually, we ended back in the WBC Village bar, where the traditional end-of-festival WBC workers’ party was in progress. People were jumping around and drinking large amounts of cheap booze. N and I settled down with C (T and L were off partying somewhere else), had a few drinks and reminisced about the past week.

As it got round to 3.30am and the first hint of dawn began to appear in the sky, we began to talk about turning in for the night. I strolled out of the tent…

And then the thought occurred to me. I’ve always wanted to see the sun rise over Glastonbury from the Stone Circle, but events and tiredness have prevented.

And the thought occurred: “Why not now?”

True, it was early in the morning, I was tired and I’d have to retrace my footsteps all the way along the railroad track and up to the top of the hill on my own. I’d also get about three hours’ sleep before we were off in the morning.

But I’d have time to sleep on the coach.

Why not now?

I slipped quietly out of the WBC village, leaving N and C to finish their drinks, passed the security guard, and headed out along the path.

Monday, Day 7, 10.30pm, York Railway Station

We hung grimly around York Railway Station, propping ourselves up on our luggage, and waiting for the last train of the night to Newcastle. Museli bars, chocolate and Coke were all that was keeping us going.

Sunday Day 6 / Monday, Day 7, 4.30am, Glastonbury – Sun It Will Rise

Light-headed, I climbed slowly through the morning mists and towards the top of the site and the Stone Circle. Any number of people were shambling about, drunk or tired or euphoric. I shambled a bit too, to fit in. All around me, people were watching the sun rise and lighting sky lanterns, the small lights rising slowly into the sky. I climbed to the top and flattened myself against the security wall, watching the sun rise slowly into the sky, thinking, finally, five years after I first came here, I’ve done it.

Tuesday, Day 8, 0.30am, Newcastle Central Station

“Farewell then.”

 “Farewell.”

And here we were at the end. Seven days after we departed Newcastle, nine hours after we left the festival, we were back home and staggering into taxis to get back to our homes. We said farewell, promised to meet again, and left each other there and then.

I reached for my money pouch around my waist containing my driver’s license and credit card.

It wasn’t there.

Motherfuck.

But it hadn’t been a bad 24 hours. I thought back to meeting N at Central Station, L, C and T at Leeds. To hearing “Melancholy Hill” for the first time, to Muse on the Saturday night, to the entire bar dancing to Stevie Wonder. And to 6am on Monday. Morning.

  

Sunday Day 6 / Monday, Day 6, 6am, Glastonbury – She Stars In Her Own Private Movie

As the morning began, I made my way slowly back down to the WBC campsite through the remains of the festival. I didn’t really know where I was going, but I have a good sense of the festival’s layout and which direction to head in, and wandered past the sign, past the tower of ribbons, down to the WBC village. As I walked through Avalon, a few bars and stalls were still heroically open, ra-ra, Rasputin, Russia’s greatest love machine…

I went through the Avalon gate, past the cows, and back home, humming “She Has A Halo”, she stars in her own private movie…

“You look happy” said the security guard on the gate as I danced slowly past him.

“I am.”

 Epilogue

•  I didn’t ever locate my missing waistbelt, but managed to cancel my cards and get a replacement driving licence in the weeks after.
• We sent a strongly worded letter to the Workers Beer Company about the coach fiasco. Things were much better the year after.
• Myself and N returned to the festivals in 2011.  
• C married his fiancee the following year.