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.