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ISSUE 11 ARCHIVE - ARE YOU AN A-LIST DIVER?

Denney Diving
ISSUE Are You An A-List Diver? It hardly seems worth getting up in the morning if there isn't paparazzi waiting on your doorstep to witness your latest public meltdown, so you have to ask yourself the question (yes, you do): "Am I an A-list diver?" Fortunately this question is now definitively answerable via rigorous scientific analysis. Specifically, the following quiz:

Q1) It's Sunday morning and due to a slight mechanical fault, your charter boat is going out an hour later than expected. What do you do?

A) Have a coffee while you wait.
B) Pace up and down the pier whilst grinding your teeth until ropes-off time.
C) Hit the gin, then hit someone that has a camera, then hit more gin.
Q2) It's singles night at your local dive club. Being single, do you:

A) Turn up to say hello. You already know most people there and you just fancy a quick drink, really.
B) Turn up and stalk people in a vaguely menacing fashion.
C) Stay at home and engage in autoerotic asphyxiation.

Q3) You get one of the questions wrong in a PADI exam. Do you:

A) Check the answer with your instructor until you're clear where you went wrong.
B) Check the answer with your instructor as a prelude to a lengthy process of self-recrimination.
C) Check into rehab.

Q4) Someone asks a crew member to take a group photo on the last day of a liveaboard trip. Do you:

A) Join in and ask them to take one with your camera as well.
B) Hide in the engine room.
C) Employ stylists, lighting technicians and a professional photographer, relocate the shoot to a studio with an artificial stage, and hire a post-production crew to touch up your facial features in Photoshop, before launching an extensive legal battle to ensure the pictures are never published in a glossy magazine. Sell the pictures for publication in a glossy magazine.

Q5) The day's diving is done and the boat returns to shore. Who will pack away your dive gear?

A) You'll do it yourself, obviously.
B) Run away.
C) Have a tantrum then run away. Come back. Have another tantrum and then run away again. Check into rehab.

Q6) What colour is your wetsuit?

A) Black.
B) You dive in your pants..
C) Gold with gold trimmings.

Q7) You are afflicted with offspring. What nomenclature will you bequeath them with in order to differentiate them from other objects?

A) Something Biblical, probably. Old Testament names are fashionable at the moment.
B) Dave, Dave 2 and Dave 3.
C) Finkick and Airsource.
Ralf Tech
Q8) Someone at the dive school suggests going for a pint at the weekend. What do you do?

A) Go for a pint.
B) Don't go for a pint.
C) Have your PA arrange, re-arrange, and re-re-arrange the time and location several times a day leading up to the event, then cancel at the last minute. Turn up around closing time on crack.

Q9) You need a new mask. How will it look?

A) Doesn't matter as long as it's comfortable.
B) Massive.
C) Diamond studded with lenses tinted so dark you can't see anything with less luminosity than a thermo-nuclear explosion.

Q10) You're at the airport and someone from your dive group that you don't know very well, asks for help carrying their bags. Do you:

A) Help them carry their bags.
B) Attempt to help them carry their bags but injure yourself and break a precious piece of dive gear in the process.
C) Launch a scathing anti-Semitic rant at no one in particular, punch a woman in the face, then check yourself into rehab.

Q11) A group of dive buddies need one more person to enable the dive trip of a lifetime to Truk Lagoon to go ahead. Being desperate, they ask you. Will you accompany them?

A) Of course.
B) You would do, except it will mean missing Eastenders.
C) Only if your pet chimp can come too. And join in the dives. And come home every night to sleep.

Q12) You move to a new area and hence need to join a new dive club. What are your criteria for joining?

A) None really. Ideally it will be an active club with lots of trips, but as long as the people are friendly, you don't really mind.
B) All members must be vegan, tee-total nonsmokers and the club must have a detailed charter outlining its views toward members of any gender, sexual, or ethnic minority with a full, legally verified procedure in place for any perceived breaches.
C) Church of Scientology Level 3 Thetans and above only.
London School Of Diving
Q13) You're down to 50 bar and have yet to serve time on the safety stop. What do you do?

A) Ascend slowly and do the stop. Ideally you'd like to finish every dive with 50 bar but sometimes it can't be helped. Better to hit the surface with 30 bar in the tank than risk a bend.
B) Panic, rip out your own mask and regulator, plus those of your buddy if possible, and bolt for the surface whilst pinwheeling your arms.
C) Wait for someone to sort it out.

Q14) You're diving for the day from a RIB. Smoking is strictly forbidden on board the vessel, but another diver has the ingenious idea of floating ten metres from the boat in a drysuit, in order to have a crafty fag during the surface interval. Will you join them?

A) Definitely. It's a great idea.
B) Whilst you don't smoke, you do understand that other people might wish to, however this won't stop you from writing a stern letter to the chairman of the dive club demanding the diver has their membership cancelled.
C) Decline on the grounds that people look up to you as a role model and it would set a bad example to your army of teenage fans.

Q15) Following your response to question 14, the other divers on the RIB have expressed the explicit desire to "give you a solid kicking". How do you respond?

A) In a conciliatory fashion, explaining you hadn't meant to offend anyone.
B) By weeping and clinging on to their legs, then punching them in the nasties when their revulsion stops them from being able to look at you any longer.
C) They're welcome to have a go... if they can get through your 13-man circle of bodyguards... in which case you will shoot them dead in self defence.

Award yourself 1 point for every answer A), a giant Toblerone for every B) and a shoplifted item for every C).

How did you do?

Mostly points: Celebrity just isn't for some folk and those folk are you. In fact it is already illegal in 14 states of America for anyone to even recognise you and I've already forgotten who or what it was that I started writing this paragraph about.

Diabetes: You are more than 17 Astronomical Units from being an A-list diver. So far, in fact, that you once got so involved in an episode of The Bill that you forgot it wasn't real and called 999 to report a robbery in progress. Except you dialled 911 and asked for the FBI.

15 shoplifting convictions: You are a star. A blessed star. Beautiful, talented, humble, magnanimous and rich. You are the guiding light of every sailor, the goal of every long ball hoofed up the pitch from defence, the plaintive bleat of every goat. Divers around the world model their fin pivots on you and equipment manufacturers name their poorly conceived new colour-schemes after you. You are currently the subject of a US extradition order for illegal congress with a minor.
Regaldive

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