A Tale of Christmas Spirit

Christmas is here, a time for fun, family, and feasting. Especially feasting. This is the one time of the year I don't watch every single thing I eat. (People think I'm naturally thin. I'm really, really not.)

It also means that thems of us as do the organising are busy. This year I ran three Christmas Dos, all of which went generally well, except for the fact that dragging people out of the office to celebrate in a year when half the team has left or been made redundant was really a bit of a non-starter. Still, the ones who turned up to the two work dos enjoyed them.

The other one was a truly heartwarming experience. I won't go into too much detail out of respect for privacy, but one member of my group chose the Christmas meal to reveal an aspect of themselves to us that was clearly a great challenge for them personally, and took a lot of courage. (I also had no idea about this, proving that no matter how clued-in you think you are, there's always something happening that you don't know about.)

I'll admit, when I first got the email about their attendance at the group meal, my first thought was "Is this... possibly... a wind-up?" I then discarded this as being one of this first reactions to a situation that actually isn't very helpful. I sent what I hope was a light-hearted message of encouragement, and turned up early to the meal*. As the clock ticked on, and person in question did not appear, I started to hope that they hadn't backed out or had a nervous fit.

But then they arrived.

I have spent a fair part of the past ten years organising this group, though I'm far from the only one to do so. It's patronising to be proud of other adults, but if it wasn't, I'd say I was hugely proud of my group. We smiled, we made welcome, we were happy to see our friend. It was one of the best Christmas meals I've ever attended.

Afterwards we received a very sweet email, with one sentence I'll quote: "There was not a single iota of discomfort. I am still on a high from it."

No matter what happens, this Christmas is a success.

Peace, goodwill, and love to all humanity, in our many unique forms. 




* Well, early for me. I'd be the first to say that time-keeping is not my strong suit.

Possibly the creepiest photo I've ever taken (Jersey)

This is a baby (doll, thank God) in a gas crib (the infant equivalent of a gas mask) in the Jersey war tunnels, where I spent some time a few weeks ago. I was there for a happy occasion - a cousin's christening - but the day after the christening was an odd day. I was meant to dive but couldn't, due to the weather.

Instead, I went to the Jersey War Tunnels. Jersey was the only part of the British Isles to have been occupied by the Nazis during World War Two. The tunnels were built by the Nazis as an underground hospital, and the site is now a museum dedicated to the occupation.

This was the same day that I knew all of my friends at work were getting their results from the redundancy process at work. I knew mine, as my boss had let me know just before I headed off to Jersey, which was nice of him. (Well, it was nice, since I'd kept my job. Had it been bad news, I might have taken a different view.)

I wandered round the memorial garden, trying not to think about what was going on on in my office, at that moment, and feeling vaguely guilty that my sense of perspective was off.

Spent the rest of the afternoon watching "Gone Girl", as the news slowly trickled in by text about who was in, and who was out. As movie choices go, it seemed appropriate.

Return From Malta

I'm now back from Malta, and, after a week back in the UK, I've finally washed and put away all my diving gear. I'm a firm believer that my wetsuit should become acquainted with disinfectant on a regular basis, although this is not necessarily much fun when it gets dark at 4.30pm. I'm probably getting a reputation in the neighbourhood as Crazy Wetsuit in Bucket Lady.

Anyway. More tales of drunkenness and octopodes* in due courses.


* Believe it or not, this is the correct plural for octopus.

I Like Magic Malta

This post's a blast from the past. Right now, I'd rather dwell on happier times, and look forward to happy times to come, specifically when I take myself, my diving kit and my holiday savings off to Malta in October, where sunken boats and much beer await. (I could write a post on how my studies are going, but I think it is fair to say that the only people who really give a monkey's about the training needs of managers in my organisation are a) the managers, b) the trainers, c) me. None of whom read this blog.)

I've had two trips to Malta; one in 2012, one in 2013. This is 2012's highlights*. Funny how, if you leave it a while, you realise what you took away from the experience:

• Learning that every trip really needs one person whom everyone else can privately agree is a bit, well, unique. Ours was P. P wore his wetsuit and a straw hat at all times. Wearing a wetsuit is not odd if you're going diving. It is odd if you are out of the water for an hour having lunch, and it's 35 degrees C in the shade. 
• Learning that you should not give the person everyone else thinks of as a bit, well, unique, the map when trying to drive to a dive site on Gozo you've never been to before. Gozo is the sister island of Malta, and home to one of the Mediterranean's most famous dive sites, the Blue Hole of Gozo (picture above). It is a running joke among visitors to Malta that the Maltese took the road signs down to confuse the Nazis, and never bothered to put them back up again. Picture the scene. I'm in a car with five divers, one of whom is trying desperately to navigate his way through Gozo's twisting roads in an overloaded Volvo, three of whom are clinging on for dear life, and the fifth is P, who was staring at the map with an expression like an alien trying to comprehend Crufts. I, the driver, asked harriedly as he approached a roundabout, "Do I turn right here?" P looked up, and uttered in a tone of mild interest: "You can turn right if you want to turn right." The second time this happened, the iron entered the soul of one of the other divers, L, who leaned forward, fixed P with a gimlet stare, and explained: "You've got the map, man! The way this works is that YOU tell HIM where he needs to go!"
• Exploring the Blue Hole of Gozo, when we finally got there. It is truly a unique dive. Like the Blue Hole of Dahab, you enter a blue pool, descend about 25m, and swim out into a stunning underwater landscape. It is one of those moments where the answer to the question: "Was it worth learning to dive?" is answered "Yes", for the rest of your life.
• Learning that, no matter how much you like someone, by the time they've uttered their catchphrases "I Like Magic Malta" and "Hey Guys", five times a day for a week, you will want to silence them by buying them a drink at every opportunity. 
• Night diving at the Popeye Village (Anchor Bay) site, and spotting a really enormous sea snail.

• Seeing a cuttlefish for the first time. 
• Learning that diving twice a day in the sunshine, then spending an evening in the pub with your mates, is a truly excellent way to spend a holiday. 
• Malta is nice, and has cheap pizza.
• Malta also has a load of old Arriva buses plying its streets, which can make things confusing... you step out of the airport, and the first thing you see is an Arriva bus pulling up on the left hand side of the road. It's hard not to wonder "Holy crap, did the pilot turn the plane round in mid-air?"
• Getting your own beer fountain in the pub sounds like a better idea than it actually is. 
• Diving the Um el-Faroud - one of the biggest sunken ships in the Mediterranean - really is all it's cracked up to be. 
• Comino's Blue Lagoon is an amazing sight. So are the nearby caves, although they are the site of one of my more alarming dive stories. I was happily trolling along in the "Fish Bowl" area, a shallow dive site popular for an end-of-day dive, when an anchor suddenly thudded into the sand a foot away from me. At the time, I just thought "Ooops!" and sculled off to the edge of the Fish Bowl. Only later did it occur to me that this story could have had a very different ending.

 More tales of anchors and beers coming soon!
* yup, this is the same holiday when I discovered the hard way (i.e. 18m down) that my inflatable BCD was leaking air.

Back from Glasto

There it is in the background, being pointy.

Actually I've been back for a while, but it's taken til now to recover the energy to blog again. I still have muddy gear requiring clearing, but most of it's been done - one bit at a time.

The festival generally went well, apart one of my volunteers having a preventable accident, and the subsequent industrial relations issues that followed. Fortunately a full-scale mutiny was avoided.

Everything else went quite well. This year I accepted that I would need to repeat anything I said several times, and consequently (I hope) came across as less of an irascible bastard than I have in previous years. I happen to be one of those people whose default brain setting for "the purpose of speaking" is "convey necessary information". This is, as I've discovered over the years, not necessarily the default setting for the rest of the world. As the Killers once sang, smile like you mean it, and be happy.

I even managed to phrase the answer to the inevitable question more tactfully. Each year, I can guarantee I'll have a conversation like this:

"Is that the Pyramid Stage?"

"No, that's the Other Stage."

"How will I know when I've found the Pyramid Stage?"

This year's reply: "Well.... it's really big, and pointy."

(This year's reply, in my head: "It looks like a sodding great pyramid.")

Start As You Mean To Go On

I ended the last year watching Doctor Who with The Best Friend and Beloved Godson #1, and began this year by swimming in the sea at St Mary's Lighthouse. I've had to explain a few times to people that a diver's New Year Swim is not like the ones that make the papers, where people run into the sea wearing swimsuits, and then quickly run back out again (good choice!). We were wearing every bit of neoprene we had. My kit included: swimsuit, rash vest (basically a long-sleeved t-shirt made of 1mm-thick neoprene), 5mm-thick wetsuit (mine also has a neoprene vest inside it for extra warmth), neoprene socks, 5mm neoprene dive boots, 5mm neoprene hood, 5mm neoprene gloves, 5mm neoprene wetsuit jacket over the first wetsuit, I think you get the idea.

We clambered out over the causeway and the rocks, to the amusement and bafflement of passers-by (it was bloody cold and windy that day) and jumped off a rock into the sea. It was sufficiently high that I had time to yell "Geronimo" on the way down.

The swim itself was great fun. We swim with fins, and a diver with fins can cover distance much more quickly than an ordinary swimmer. I wore my mask and snorkel; no-one else did, but I'm not fond of getting seawater up my nose. This did allow me to have a good look down at the sea, which had all the gin-clear clarity and warmth of runny mud. No diving there for a while. On the rocks, a retriever barked repeatedly, as if saying "I don't know what these foolish humans are doing, but I'll keep watch until they stop doing it".

I really want to do this more often. I'd forgotten how much fun it is just to swim without all my dive gear on, fond as I am of it. We were like human seals, splashing around in the waves and playing on the rocks. It was surprisingly not-cold in the water. We were in for about 40 minutes, then splashed back ashore to get changed in the car park (yes, my hobby involves exposing myself in car parks...) and enjoy a warm doughnut and hot chocolate. One of my buddies observed that you probably put back in the calories you burned on the dive by eating the doughnut. I replied that it's lucky I wasn't trying to lose weight, then. The doughnut was great.

Gifts in the Bible

This is an excerpt from a recent piece I wrote for the church Christmas service, "Gifts in the Bible".

...one more story, because it seems I cannot write anything without throwing in a reference to scuba diving somehow. A while back, I read the story “Menfish”, by Jacques Cousteau, which is the account of the first ever scuba dive in what was then occupied France. As Cousteau puts it, when the first ever working aqualung system arrived in the village where he was living, “no child on Christmas morning ever unwrapped a parcel with more anticipation”. With his wife and best friend as support, Cousteau tested the equipment and made the first scuba dive in history. I remember reading that story, and suddenly realising that I was reading part of my own history. Had Cousteau not made that dive, my own life would be very different. What happened in 1940 affected my life 70 years later.

This week, I read the Bible again, especially the Acts of the Apostles and the letters to the Corinthians, which I think may have perhaps the highest concentration of the words “gift” and “giving” in the entire book. The church being established in those books, however imperfectly, was one in which people would love each other, treat each other as equals, and support each other whenever it was needed. At one point, Paul writes to his followers saying “Since you have plenty at this time, it is only fair that you should help those who are in need. Then, when you are in need and they have plenty, they will help you”. I read that passage, thought about the history of Christianity and my own journey in which I arrived at the Unitarian church here in Newcastle, and felt the same sensation: that the actions of people living long before I was born had led, in one way or another, in my receiving a great gift.

(As a sidenote, I have often thought that when you go looking for something in the Bible, you’ll usually find it, but it won’t necessarily be what you expected. Perhaps that says more about the person doing the looking than it does about the Bible.)

The End of the Year Approaches

And this is probably the last blogpost from me until 2014. I'm looking forward to a new year and a new beginning. Merry Christmas.

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!

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.

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!

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.

Pip's Graves

Bit of a departure this, literally. I've left my usual Northern haunts for a visit down south to family, where we stopped off to look at "Pip's Graves" in St James's Churchyard, Cooling, in Kent. These are the tiny gravestones described by Charles Dickens as being the graves of Pip's brothers in "Great Expectations". You can see a picture here, they're quite strange and sad:

Pip's Graves

I really ought to read some Dickens this year.

I should also soon have finished my write-ups of Glastonbury 2010 and Leeds 2011, they'll be posted up here soon, and the dive season is coming! Yay!

Back from the Red Sea

Where I went for a happy solo week of shore diving. Saw lots of fish, slept lots, ate lots, dived lots, made new friends and drank much Sakara beer. More coming soon. Here's a nice picture of a lionfish: