DIVING IS ONE OF THOSE INFINITELY HUGE TERMS like love and beauty that can mean virtually anything.
     Example: a month ago, I surfaced after cavorting with the biggest fish I've ever seen, had my fins removed by an Italian siren of indescribable lusciousness and slipped into the on-deck hot tub as the Californian sunshine glittered on the canopy of the giant kelp.
     Whereas today, I sank a pint with two blokes who'd been working on the submarine waste outfall of the picturesque potash mine at Boulby, North Yorkshire.
     The outfall is 20m down in the impenetrable liquid fog we call the North Sea. It's August, so the fog is not laced with crushed ice. For professional divers around here, this is as good as it gets.
     The elder of the pair was 61. His face resembled a relief map of the ocean floor - particularly the bit around the Marianas Trench. He was so steeped in salt that, when he finally slips this mortal coil, his remains will be perfectly preserved without recourse to the embalmer's art.
     Now, I can think of plenty of things I'd like to be doing when I'm 61, most of them involving a yacht, an unlimited supply of vintage Dom Perignon and the British Virgin Islands. Diving on a waste outfall off Staithes comes relatively low on my list.
     And yet I felt a real affinity with these windswept, hard-bitten men of the Dinosaur Coast. They wasted little, especially words. As one remarked to me about the other: "'E can skin a fart, can Eric, an' mek a fur coat out of eet."
     That's the same cast of mind that makes your dive-club stalwart spend £300 on a computer, then haggle for two hours over the price of a fill. It gave me a warm feeling inside. It was too long since I'd encountered the breathtaking meanness of spirit that is the defining characteristic of the British diver.
     It took me straight back to my days as a BSAC novice, when the members of London Branch would nurse a half of bitter for hours, just to avoid getting a round in.
     I can still recall the Silver Jubilee party we threw for Hamish Lumsden's wetsuit, which sported more patches than a Shaker quilt.
     Not that I was immune. I bought a mask that didn't fit and, because it cost me forty quid, endured 10 years of misery.
     When the strap snapped, I thanked Providence and bought one with a revolutionary design that kept the sea out of my eyes. But I spent the next decade fumbling around in pitch blackness with a £100 torch that worked only on land.
     I went fishing this morning for mackerel from Shaun's hardboat. Shaun is about to add a diving platform to the stern. I told him about the Jacuzzi on the Californian dive boat. He snorted: "Aye, an' mine'll 'ave a Yorkshire Jacuzzi."
     "What's that?" I enquired.
     "A boocket o' bloody watter!" he replied. This was more like it Ð the spirit that forged the greatest divers in the world, founding a tradition of gruff, bloody-minded, short-armed, long-pocketed misanthropy.
     Now I'm as much a sucker for valet-diving as the next man. There's a lot to be said for having a voluptuous nymph in a bikini guiding you gently to the hot tub on a liveaboard compared to which the Royal Yacht Britannia was a condemned guano barge.
     But when push comes to shove, I'd have to throw in my lot with Shaun and Hamish Lumsden and the Boulby potash boys.
     After all, you can take a man out of the waste outfall, but you can't take the waste outfall out of the man.