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LOOK AT
THE GUNS
ON THAT
War graves. Are you fed up hearing about them yet? I know I am. Every time I hear the words rogue-divers and miscreants, I find that my back teeth have involuntarily locked together in anger.
This makes reading the Ministry of Defence review documents not only painful, but impossible to do in public - the furious chipmunk look is not attractive. It's the sheer hypocrisy I find difficult to stomach. The idea of the Ministry of Defence, a veritable den of rogues and miscreants, getting all moralistic with divers - oh, please!
Of course war graves should be protected. Primarily they need protecting from the numpties at the MoD who have cheerfully sold the salvage rights on so many of them.
Let's be honest, concerns about disturbing the dead have never been a motivating factor at the MoD. Retrieving warheads, valuables, and anything that would prove hideously embarrassing if it fell into the wrong hands is the number one priority when a ship is lost. Navy divers will be required to shovel the dead bodies aside to achieve this mission.
I know this is true, because James Bond did exactly that in Tomorrow Never Dies on TV the other night. Now there's a man who has his priorities well sorted: save the world, shag the girl. Though not necessarily in that order.
Many divers might harbour delusions of being Bond, but apart from satisfying our fantasy lives, why do we want to dive on war graves? It's not as if we're short of wrecks. The UK coastline has thousands. Many of those I visit resemble rejects from a scrap-merchant's yard.
Asking people why they dive on wrecks goes to the heart of UK diving. There are certainly people who dive in the hope of retrieving some kind of treasure - a porthole, a telegraph, a manky old tap-fitting hacked off a bit of pipework. Many of them are not too fussy. One look at the state of the helicopter in Stoney Cove will confirm that.
Are these people evil? I say no. Sad, perhaps, but not evil.
The priority for most divers is simply to get a decent dive on something that actually resembles a wreck. Divers love the wrecks of Scapa Flow, but not because they think they can rip something off them. These are large, interesting wrecks with history attached to them. They also have a magic ingredient: GUNS.
There are a lot of boy-divers out there. Boys like guns. Boys will be able to tell you how many guns were on the wreck, their diameter and what kind of artillery shell they fired. Boys make lists of the technical specifications of warships and post them up on their websites like porn. For some reason, boys can get terribly excited about firepower.
I don't understand the thrill, nor do I know any girls who are fascinated by guns. The only way most girls could get excited about guns would be if they were very shiny and made by Gucci.
As I travel to work on the train, I see grown men practically wetting themselves over the graphic descriptions of the type of armaments being deployed in Afghanistan. I have to conclude that these blokes have something I don't - penile dementia.
Strange urges aside, the good aspect of the war-graves issue is that it has raised our awareness of our own history. The sad aspect is that it has allowed the opportunistic to slag off their fellow-divers in a bid to draw attention to themselves.
The French government has announced that it is to dig up a load of WW1 war graves near the Somme to build a new airport terminal. I listened for the reassuring popping sound of vicars with a mission exploding with indignation, but it never came. Clearly it takes divers, not French bulldozers, to inspire the wrath of the grave-protectors.
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