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.