"WELL, COVER ME IN JELLY AND CALL ME MARGARET! Nigel's come up in the world!" My jaw dropped as we cruised up a driveway that was longer than our street. "I'm surprised he ever finds his way home, knowing his navigational skills."
     The drive was no more than the house deserved. "To think he once lived in the branch van for a week when rats invaded his squat."
     "Why don't you pull over there by the orchard?" my wife suggested.
     "This," I replied, "is a J-registered Sierra estate with birdshit all over it. I'm not parking it between a Ferrari and a Mercedes 500SC." And thus we arrived at the Old Divers' Barbecue - the first branch reunion I'd attended in 15 years.
     We were ushered by a professional caterer into a garden that shared its shortest border with Wyoming. As for the guests, the lean had turned plump, the hirsute bald, the impoverished very evidently rich.
     I gravitated, champagne flute in hand, to a little group who were poring over an album of snaps taken at various dive sites in 1980.
     "Look! That's Jeremy! What's he doing these days?"
     "Nothing. He's dead."
     "Good God. And isn't that Hilary?"
     "Hattie. She married big Norman, they had two kids, he started drinking, she ran off with a lady firefighter from Istanbul. Last I heard they were raising chinchillas in the Dominican Republic."
     "Good God. Now that's Jean-Luc D'Entressangle. He was all over the papers, wasn't he?"
     "That's right - turns out he was a bigamist."
     "Jean-Luc?" chipped in a passer-by. "A trigamist, actually."
     "Good God."
     Our reminiscences were interrupted by the arrival of the final guest. He was hard to identify at first. He wore a one-piece motorcycle suit and a helmet with a blacked-out visor.
     His companion, by contrast, wore nothing save a Spandex bustiere and a leather skirt that in bad light might have been mistaken for a weightlifter's belt. She induced an involuntary gasp from the branch as she pouted and flicked her ash-blonde tresses over a lovely shoulder.
     But the biggest gasp was reserved for the moment her mysterious beau removed his crash helmet. "Christ! It's Simon Montgomery!"
     "Not Simon the Chartered Surveyor? Simon the sleeping pill? Simon the just-a-half-please-I'm-diving-next-Wednesday? Simon, Man At Burton? Get that tattoo!"
     A polychromatic dragon with a wolf's head and huge breasts appeared to be slithering from Simon's left ear onto the gleaming expanse of his shaven pate.
     "Well hi, diverse divers!" he purred. "This is Karina. She's Romanian."
     "Good God," I breathed.
     As it transpired, Simon and I had two things in common. Unlike everyone else present we still dived - and we didn't own yachts.
     In fact there was enough ocean-going hardware represented in this Surrey backyard to fill Lymington Marina. Frank was building a steel-hulled liveaboard in Sardinia; and Colin had hailed a BSAC RIB off Swanage to free his yacht's prop and, in the great tradition of the Club, had rewarded the diver with a cup of tea and two quid.
     I wandered off to inspect the summer house - a structure of a scale to rival the Albert Hall - and did some elementary maths. Of the branch members I had known in 1980, it seemed, 20% were dead, 79% richer than Croesus, and 1% drove a J-reg Sierra.
     Life, eh?