ISSUE 14 ARCHIVE - DIVING DOWNSIDES

BRITISH SUMMER TIME

Yes, the three funniest words in the Oxford Dictionary. More amusing than “Tory Party Victory”, rib-ticklinger than “Labour Economic Masterplan”, “British Summer Time” has me cracking up every time.

‘Cos it’s not is it? It’s shit here. Absolutely rubbish. So who can we blame? There’s only one thing. Continental drift. Christ it’s slow. A centimetre a year. Not good enough. I won’t be seeing Blighty slipping into the Tropics in my lifetime. And nor will my children, or yours. There is only one solution – we have to tie a large rope to France and start winching straight away.

Hopefully before we get a World Cup we’ll be right next door to Qatar, and enjoying 45 degree heat in the shade, with our dry suits on eBay.

PADI COURSE DIRECTORS

You’ve done your Open Water when you were little. Breezed through Advanced and DM. And found your Instructor’s piss-easy. But you wanted to go further. To get that final badge. Be the top of your tree. So you forked out over five grand and hopped on a plane to Malaysia to become a Course Director. What does that allow you to do? Yes, direct courses. In diving. You can even invent your own. Like the new “Solo Naturist Diver” that I recently did in a German lake.

But there’s a melancholy, isn’t there? You’ve done them all, nothing left for you now. You will be a CD for the rest of your life. Sad isn’t it?

But “No” I say.

There is one thing you can do. Go commercial. Wear a hard hat and breathe through a hose at 500 metres. Problem is though, the girls ain’t so pretty on oil rigs.

SURGEON FISH

Been to med school have you? No. Never had to drink heavily for six years with an exam at the end. Never had to do your MRCS parts 1 and 2 then wield a knife at three in the morning sewing up a drunken fool who fell through a plate glass window. Never even had to join the Masons to get ahead in your profession. And not even called Mister Surgeon Fish. So how can you diminish the dark arts and call yourself that?

Mind you, you probably have a far better idea than half the EU “surgeons” that arrive over here from the Baltic. Took my Mum’s thyroid out when she only went in for a total hysterectomy.

CAVERN DIVERS

There’s no point really. The cave divers get the chicks before they die all too soon. The cavern divers just pretend they are cave divers to impress in the pub. It’s like going into a big underwater garage with the door open. Where’s the skill in that? None. A yawning opening you just pop into without banging your head, and back out again. “Wow, what a cavern”, versus “I dived ten miles into a cave complex in Serbia”. There’s no contest really. So pay up, do the cave course, triple your life insurance and say goodbye to the kids forever. Be a cave diver mate.

D-RINGS

Frankly Q-rings would be better. They can still hold the same amount of clippie-on stuff, but there would be a pointy bit to get the stones out of horse’s hooves as well.

OCTOPUSES

Hippopotamus – Hippopotami – Hippopotamuses. Octopus – Octopuses – Octopodes. A huge abscess. Puss – Pussies. No wonder half our kids can’t speak properly where I live. This language is a farce. Let’s stick to Esperanto.

DIVING MEDICAL TEXT BOOKS

Christ, these are dull. I once left one in a dive shop in Mexico as I couldn’t be bothered to carry it back. Voluminous in size, boring of literacy, they make the early versions of the St James’ Bible look portable and the Highway Code look interesting.

So C’MON dive docs... this is an awesome medical specialty, where we could attract the cream of world medicine, so stop boring us with gas physiology and big up the jellyfish attack pictures. We want to see more case histories of diving numpties that forgot their BCDs and used bagpipes instead on Scapa Flow. Then lost buoyancy and ended up inside a pot. That keeps me awake when learning, not your page-turning-temazepam you call a textbook.

SCAPA FLOW

I don’t know when we’re going to get over the War.

MIRANDA KRESTOVNIKOFF

Perhaps if you had a more pronounceable and spellable surname, you might be
more famous and a judge on X-factor. Like Cheryl Cole. Or Ant and Dec. If I were Max Clifford, you would be Mindy K. and I would have gotten you on Blue Peter, hitched to a footballer and in a girl band by now. Perhaps even the diving side-kick to the new Dr Who.

So sort it out. The nation’s yoof can only gutturally utter three syllables, not seen when talking about last night’s TV.

THE BENDS

One, a life threatening illness. The other a particularly whiny depressing album from faded popsters.

It makes it darn hard to look up on Google you know.

MONTY HALLS’ DOG

Goddamit that pup is sweet. But I hate it. Ever since my kid saw it on the telly he has been whining for one. “Daddy can I have a dog called Reuben toooo”. I have to remind him that we live on the 20th floor of a housing project in South Korea where if you turn your back it’ll get served up to you in that evening’s takeaway.

Why couldn’t Monty have a chicken instead? Cheaper to keep and ever since Avian Flu my neighbours won’t go near these bringers of death anymore.

Next time you do a series Monty, think of the global effects of your stardom, not just the UK.

Does anything about diving annoy you? Send in your ‘Diving Downsides’.