THE NEWS THAT FORT BOVISAND IS TO BE SOLD affected me far more than I had expected. After all, I hadn't set foot within those grim ramparts for at least 10 years.
     But to hear that the cold, stone heart of British diving was to be redeveloped as Europe's biggest branch of Starbucks has filled me with something close to panic. It's like when your mum finally abandons the bungalow and moves into sheltered accommodation. You suddenly realise that you can never go home again.
     What was it about Bovi that etched it so deeply into the mythology of our sport? It certainly wasn't the creature comforts. With its 6ft thick walls, its lightless dormitories and its subtle yet all-pervading odour of Napoleonic urine, it always made me feel like a low-priority prisoner on day release.
     "Right, No. 1867452! When you've slopped out, eaten your cold beans and rinsed your mug, report to Sgt-Major Binks for your air ration, then fall in at the harbour. No, not literally, 1867452, you 'orrible little moron!"
     In the stoical spirit of the times, we would always decamp to Bovisand for our first dive of the season - traditionally the Easter weekend. Meteorologically, this could mean almost anything. One year, you could be sunbathing on the bar roof; the next, struggling with frostbitten fingers to start a sulky outboard in a full-on blizzard.
     I recall with particular affection the time the carbs on our 1924 British Seagull iced up halfway across Plymouth Sound.
     We drifted helplessly in the teeth of a Siberian gale. To pass the time, we tried to list in chronological order the names of all the past BSAC chairmen, but gave up after two.
     After three days and nights, water was running dangerously low. Novice Diver Bates was reduced to sucking the salty ice crystals from Hamish Lumsden's beard, but of course it drove him mad. Lumsden, that is, not Bates.
     We were finally picked up by a whaler off the Newfoundland Banks. By this time we were in pretty poor shape. Had Advanced Diver "Sparky" Wilson not converted the boat radio into a primitive convector heater, I'm not at all sure we would have made it.
     We had eaten one of the paddles and half of poor Brigham's wetsuit. Our backsides had frozen to the boat tubes and had to be thawed off with warm cod-liver oil.
     I remember, too, the Underwater Explosives Course - easily the most fun you can have without actually killing people. A photograph on the lecture-room door set the tone for the day: a mound of limbs heaped in a cot and captioned: "Four Into One WILL Go!"
     My attempts to bisect a length of 6in piping with a shaped charge would not have qualified me to sink the Belgrano. But I did learn how to boil a kettle in 30 seconds with just half a pound of plastic explosive - a technique that often proves invaluable when our North London suburb is affected by power cuts.
     Security in those innocent pre-terrorist times was quaintly informal. My dive bag was considerably heavier when I left than when I arrived. We're not the only house in our street with a Cordtex washing line.
     And then there was the food in the canteen. Looking back, it must have been distinctly unappetising if we were reduced to barbecuing 8in artillery shells on the beach. Still, for all that, the sale of the old fort marks the end of an era. As I said to a mate over a pint the other day, "I think Bovisand will be badly missed."
     And he replied: "Then they should aim more carefully."