Hanging with the Hippies: Newcastle Community Green Festival

Back in June this year, I wandered on down to the Newcastle Community Green Festival at the weekend, late on Sunday afternoon. I’d hoped to get there earlier, but life got in the way, as it is wont to do.

Now in its 16th incarnation, the Green Festival and I have a long history, going back to 2002, when I first attended it in Exhibition Park with my university boyfriend at the time. I remember the sun shone and we had fun. In contrast, in 2003 I was staffing a stall on climate change with a friend from the university’s People and Planet environment campaigning group (having since broken up with the boyfriend), and it chucked it down all day. It rained to the point that a regular occurance involved sticking your head out of the marquee, yelling “Watch out!”, and then poking the tent roof with a broomstick to tip the water that was collecting in it onto the ground. I also remember watching live poetry, the joy of trying to carry a massive display board between two people all the way from Exhibition Park to Central Station and back to Durham, then eating a much-needed pizza when I got back home.

Since then, I’ve attended when I can, a highlight being when I and some friends spent a sunny afternoon there back around 2008 when it moved to Leazes Park, when the sun shone, they had a live dance music stage, and a streaker entertained everyone by running into the pond and staying there doing laps whilst the police waited for him on the shore. There was no festival in 2009 due to “financial irregularities”. I know someone who knows the organisers, and her verdict was “corruption never, possible financial confusion with the paperwork – yes”. Anyway, the festival is now back on, and I went along to enjoy.

This time around I was on my own, which didn’t particularly trouble me. I strolled on up to Leazes Park on a grey and slightly drizzly Sunday afternoon, and said hello to a friend who was staffing the Newcastle Cycling Campaign stall... (TBC)

Boat of Puking Divers, Part the Fourth

The other best cure for seasickness is to jump in the sea. Since it’s caused by confusion between the signals for the eye and the inner ear balance mechanism, being in the sea, and thus moving with it, cures this. Hence the oft-recommended cure for seasick divers – “Just go on the next dive” – is not born entirely of heartlessness. (Although there may be an element of that among the more gung-ho instructors.) And yes, you can throw up through a scuba regulator mouthpiece underwater, though I imagine it’s not much fun.

The first batch of divers kitted up for the second dive, and jumped in. Two of them promptly jumped back out again; a diver from Edinburgh whose drysuit was leaking badly, and A, who threw up at the bottom and promptly decided he didn’t fancy half an hour’s swimming around and puking through a reg (since the cause in this case was an OD on brandy, jumping into the sea didn’t cure him).

L decided that he would take A’s place on the dive, and jumped in, leaving me with J as my dive buddy. As I kitted up, I wondered balefully if this was L’s idea of revenge over the failure-to-stop-vanishing-banana incident.

We submerged as fast as was safe. In answer to a frequently asked question, yes, you can (and we do) dive when it’s raining, but it’s not ideal for two reasons, even though we are planning to submerge ourselves entirely in water: a) rain and wind stir up the sea and lower the visibility, and the lack of light means photos don’t come out so well, b) it’s one thing to be entirely surrounded by water, and another to be bobbing about on the surface getting cold water repeatedly blown into your face. Think of the difference between swimming in the pool and getting caught in a winter downpour without an umbrella. It’s like that.

This dive immediately looked more promising. The vis was not brilliant as we were relatively near the shore, so the surge (waves going back and forth overhead) was pushing a bit of sand around, but the light was a bit better and there was immediately more to see. More plants, more fish, more rocks, and less depth, so more light to see them. Also, a welcome absence of the slightly sick feeling I’d had in the pit of my stomach. It was so mild I hadn’t realised I had it, until I submerged and it went away. (It may not surprise anyone that it was whilst diving off Eyemouth that I developed my habit of singing “I Feel Better” by Hot Chip to cheer myself up during surface intervals.)

We happily paddled about hunting for lumpsuckers. It was an interesting experience, which I’m tempting to say was a bit like diving in a washing machine, albeit the sea didn’t actually spin us around! I don’t particularly mind diving in a bit of surge or current, as it’s quite fun playing with the sea. (Albeit a wise diver never ever forgets that the sea is bigger than you are, stronger than you are, doesn’t get tired, and has no affection for you whatsoever.)

Suddenly, J spotted it. There, beneath a rock, was a flash of pink in the sandy water. I promptly swam on over, and was rewarded with a sight I’d never seen before: a lumpsucker guarding its eggs. As you can see from the photo, the “lump” part of the name is apt. They must be one of the least hydrodynamic creatures in the sea.

As for the “sucker” part, the lumpsucker has an interesting reproductive cycle. They normally inhabit deeper waters than most divers venture into, but during spring, the lumpsuckers migrate into the shallower and warmer waters near the shore to lay and fertilise their eggs.

The female lumpsucker then thinks to herself “bugger this child-rearing lark, I’m off”, and swims back into the deeper waters, leaving the male lumpsucker to guard the eggs, which are attached to rocks near the shoreline. The male then attachs himself to a rock near the eggs to defend them and keep them oxygenated by finning water over them. Since the eggs are on rocks near the shore, the swell of the tide going in and out would dislodge the male, were it not for the part that his ventral fins (the fins just below the head) form a sucker, which he uses to firmly anchor himself.

I was extremely excited by this sighting. I enjoy the sensation of diving in itself, but for me an extra-good dive is when I see something I haven’t seen before. The photo I took can be seen above. We paddled around the rocks some more, then headed on back to the boat for the journey home and a hot chocolate. Several toasted sarnies in the harbour café afterwards, and we were on our way home from the Boat of Puking Divers.

Boat of Puking Divers, Part the Third

B sat with his arms folded.

“Why aren’t you going back in?” I asked, as I attempted to make myself a coffee whilst not acquiring a burn on my left arm to match the one on my right (the result of an accident with a kettle earlier this year); no easy feat when the boat is pitching around.

“It’s cold.”

This surprised me, as B is by no means a fair-weather diver. Then it occurred to me. “Didn’t you just get back from the Phillipines?”

He gave me a look of deepest gloom. If you imagine the expression of people who have just arrived back on the plane from Florida in August wearing t-shirts, shorts and sandals only to look out of the plane window and see black skies and hurling rain, multiplied by a factor of ten, you’ve more or less got it. “Yup.”

“’Scuse me.”

This was not B, but A, another regular dive buddy of mine. A suddenly stood up and dashed past me to join the other divers on the puking side of the boat*. This also surprised me, since I’ve never seen A throwing up on the boat.

“What’s up with him?”

“Two bottles of wine and a brandy last night.”

“No sympathy then.”

“’Scuse me.”

B pushed past me to join A. This was becoming a pattern. I looked through the wildly-lurching porthole, and counted five people throwing up over the side. This was something of a record, which J, the senior divemaster pointed out with slightly more relish than was necessary. I decided to go outside myself; I’m not usually cursed with seasickness (thank you, God), but even I was feeling slightly “off”. The best way to cure this is to sit in the fresh air and look at the horizon, which I did for all of five minutes, before I got fed up with being rained on and decided I could look at the horizon through the entrance to the cabin.

As I wandered in vaguely thinking about a Mini Roll, J was asking “Does this banana belong to anyone?”

I looked across. “Yes, it’s L’s,” I replied, somewhat pointlessly since half the banana was well on its way to become part of J. I sincerely hoped this meant L wasn’t going to be suffering on our next dive. I can’t say that I was exactly looking forward to the dive – I was having visions of the warm seas, clear water, and sunshine I hoped to encounter on my upcoming summer holiday in Crete** – but it did have the great advantage that it would take us away from the boat of puking divers.



* There is a system for this, and it’s mentioned in the PADI Manual, believe it or not. You go to the leeward side of the boat (leeward = if you stand on that side facing towards the sea, the wind is blowing on the back of your head, not the front – windward is the other way around), and throw up over the side, the theory being that the wind will blow it away from both you and the boat. Which makes sense, since if there’s one thing guaranteed to add insult to injury when you’ve just thrown up, it’s getting it all blown back in your face. (The PADI Manual also helpfully adds: “Stay out of the head [toilet] – that’s about the worst place to go”).

** Correctly, as it turned out. Watch this space.

Boat of Puking Divers, Part the Second

I cannot say that the first dive out of Eyemouth was the most visually interesting dive I’ve ever done, but in its own way, it had a certain hypnotic calm. Vis was not too bad, and we were at 12-15m. The only real sights were the pale grey rippled sand beneath us, the green water around us, an occasional rock or crab on the bottom, and thousands of small hydroids in the water around us. Hydroids are the free-floating larvae of sea anemones before they attach themselves to rocks, and look like very small jellyfish. It was a surreal experience, but in some ways almost meditative, drifting steadily along with the current and following the divers ahead.

After half an hour, I was mentally taking bets with myself as to how soon it would be before the large male novice diver (LMND) in front of me got towards the reserve on his air tank and we went up*. I interspersed this with the occasional barrel roll to see if my buddy was there, as he had a fondness for swimming about two metres above me. Technically I should have been swimming at the same level he was, but I like to see what’s on the bottom… he told me afterwards that drifting along with the current with only the bottom for reference was giving him nausea and vertigo, and he was happier swimming a bit higher up.

The answer proved to be “not that much longer”. LMND and his buddy started to head upwards, accompanied by a flurry of hand signals from the instructor in charge of the dive. My buddy produced his SMB and deployed it at about 6m whilst we were making a safety stop: it was as well he did it at this depth, as the line attached to the damn thing got tangled around his tank valve, and we did the underwater Untangling Waltz. Buddy and I surfaced with no mishaps and yoicked ourselves back onto the boat (thank god for boats with lifts).

The instructor informed us that his hand signals had been intended to mean “you two can carry on if you want to”. We replied that our actions had been intended to mean “we know, but we don’t want to ‘cause it’s a bit cold and boring, and we fancy a cup of tea and a Mini Roll”.

In search of the aforementioned Mini Roll, I lurched into the cabin – the sea was getting quite choppy – and encountered a shivering, coat-wrapped and be-hatted mass in the form of one of my regular dive buddies, B. B looked up at me and ground out “I’m not going back in there”.

It was going to be one of those mornings.


* Risk factors for going through your air quickly: being a physically large person, being male, and being new (new divers tend to move through the water less efficiently, and waste more air through inflating and deflating their buoyancy jackets). The reserve air is the amount of air everyone on the dive agrees to have left at the end of the dive, usually around 50 bag. You never plan to dive until the tank is empty, for safety reasons – you need the reserve in case something delays you on the way to the surface or one of your buddies runs low on air.

Back Very Soon

I've been writing stuff, believe me, and it will be posted here at the weekend. Until then, in the words of someone much wiser than me...

I Thought There Was A Light At The End of the Tunnel

And it turned out to be some bugger with a torch and some more work, hence the absence of blogging fun. Believe me, I know this blog is littered with half-finished tales, but I shall not give up. With the patience of my friends and enough caffeine I can do anything, so just watch this space until I'm back from holiday in a couple of weeks, and there shall be completed tales, fun and photos. Promise!

Boat of Puking Divers, Part the First

I’ve been diving a lot recently, hence the absence of blogging activity. I’m now a Rescue Diver following a recent trip to Bute, of which more shortly. I’m also doing my Emergency First Response course, basically a First Aid course run through the my local diving centre. Always good for laugh when you have divers pretending to be casualties and two of our senior instructors, J and T, taking the class. T actually works in the health profession and has had cause to do CPR for real on three occasions.

None of them worked out in the way anyone hoped, but apparently this is not uncommon with CPR. (Should this sort of thing happen to you, try to keel over as near to a defibrillator as possible. Apparently the odds of being successfully revived if your heart stops plummet drastically after about six minutes regardless of the quality of the CPR being performed. This little First Aid bulletin brought to you care of CyclingDiver.)

As well as Fun with EFR videos (if you have a macabre sense of humour, the EFR Training Video is not unlike an episode of Casualty with voiceovers), I’ve been jumping off a boat into the North Sea on a regular basis. Specifically, the Scimitar out of Eyemouth harbour. I rather like boat dives as they involve slightly less scrabbling up and down over rocks in full diving kit. My full kit weighs around 25 kilos, and whilst I’m reasonably fit this is still quite a lot of weight to be carrying around.

Instead, you simply stride off the boat, go for the dive, then surface, scrabble onto the boat’s trail line (the rope along the side), haul yourself along the side and stand on the boat lift, which lifts you and deposits you back on the deck just in time for a nice cup of tea and a biscuit.

At least, this is the theory. My most recent dive was slightly less harmonious than this might suggest. Not, I must add, due to any fault of the excellent captain of the Scimitar, but due to the marvellousness (or lack thereof) of the British weather. Cold and rainy. It rained when we set off from Newcastle, it rained whilst we were driving up there, it rained whilst we were unloading our dive gear from the car to the boat, it rained whilst we were getting changed, and it rained whilst we were on the boat. This did not promise good visibility (see the photo for what the view was like under the water).

Whilst it is true that our hobby involves getting wet, it is a mistake to assume that this means divers are impervious to rain (although it must be said that a wetsuit, semidry suit or dry suit is an excellent choice for standing around in the rain). When you’re in the water, you’re no more aware of the water around you than you are of the air around you in the air world. Having cold rain blowing in your face is an entirely different experience.

Anyway, we bumped out into the chilly waters of Eyemouth, and jumped off the boat to begin our first drift dive. (A drift dive is where you drift along with the current.) Always fun, especially when, on the way up, you looked out of the window at the grey fog rolling over the sea, thought “It’ll be fun for the captain trying to spot us in this”, and then thought “Did I put my surface marker buoy* and reel back onto my buoyancy jacket after I took the jacket in to be serviced? No, I did not.” My strobe** had also packed in after it flooded on a recent shore dive, although I did have a smaller automatic strobe stuck on my jacket shoulder.

This did not bode well.

To be continued...


* Surface marker buoy, or SMB : A six-foot inflatable fluorescent orange tube which is filled with air from the diver’s tank (usually using the spare “octopus” mouthpiece, or sometimes the diver’s exhaled breath), either on the surface or whilst the diver is submerged. Regarded as essential safety kit for boat diving as it enables the boat captain to find you in poor visibility or if you surface further away from the boat than intended, due to currents or getting lost. The reel is attached to the buoy when deploying it at depth, so that you can stay linked to it!

** Strobe: Flashing light, usually worn on the diver’s shoulder, to enable other divers to find you underwater in poor visibility. Also used on the surface when night diving. Most divers I know favour the sort made by Beaver Sports, which combines a torch and strobe and comes in handy if your main torch packs in during a dive. Also regarded as pretty much essential safety kit when doing UK dives: the vis is not always, or even often, awful, but you might as well take the strobe in case you need it, since it weighs almost nothing.