TOTALLY RADICAL, HARDCORE, BANGIN'. I hear those words and I know that I'm in for some lame experience made all the more pitiful for an excess of hype, posturing and ridiculous jargon.
     Diving seems largely to have escaped the arrival of pseudo-Californian teenage speak. Perhaps this is because the only people truly convinced that diving is an extreme sport are insurance underwriters. Perhaps it's because most of us are a bunch of old farts who think that "shredding" is what happens when your goody bag gets caught round the prop.
     So when I hear someone describing themselves or their diving as extreme, what I hear in my head is "pretentious loser". Those people who are doing extreme dives - cavers such as Rick Stanton or Martyn Farr, for instance, who dive in conditions and for periods of time that would reduce the average person to a quivering blob of terror - would never bother to use the word "extreme" to describe their dives.
     So imagine my delight when I came across "extreme ironing". What could more thoroughly deflate the egos of the self-important than to be confronted with people merrily doing their sport, accompanied by an ironing board and a stack of freshly pressed linen?
     Extreme ironing is a relatively new movement within adventure sports, but it has already captured imaginations around the world. For anyone who missed the Channel 4 documentary showing the world championships, a visit to www.extremeironing.com will fill you in.
     Anyone prepared to take on the challenge of wielding an iron in unfeasibly surreal conditions can take part. Just don't expect anyone to take you too seriously when you're dragging your board around.
     It was too good to resist. Technical diving is an equipment-intensive sport, with more posturing and egos than a small-town beauty pageant. What harm could throwing an iron into the equation do?
     And so I found myself preparing for a 100m dive in Dahab's Blue Hole, complete with a 1m-long ironing board and a trashy, gold-finished Egyptian iron. Side-mounting an ironing board isn't as hard as it sounds. Deploying it under water is another matter.
     Luckily, it's hard to get too stressed when you're trying to stop yourself cracking up with laughter.
     The downside to spending a lot of time in the water in a drysuit, in conditions in which you're drinking shedloads of liquid to keep yourself hydrated, is that inevitably you need a wee. The exciting bit of the dive is over in the first 20 minutes, then you're left to drift about on decompression stops with little to think about except how much you'd love to take a leak. Torture.
     Drysuit manufacturers such as O'Three have come up with ingenious condom and rubber tubing systems for blokes. The best a girl can get is a nappy. The idea of adding extra padding to an area that is quite large enough already fills me with horror, but it has to be done.
     It's hard to maintain a glamorous, girl-about-town image when you're waddling about in an incontinence pad. It's especially hard at the end of the dive, when you're waddling about in a used incontinence pad.
     Unfortunately for me, my Egyptian-style Pampers seemed to have achieved a sticky fusion under the intense pressure. I decided I was going to need the assistance of a power shower to get them off.
     "Hey, blondie, you forgot your fabric conditioner," joked one of the bemused onlookers as I emerged somewhat gingerly from the dive, my iron clipped conspicuously to the front of my kit. His words may have been truer than he could possibly imagine.
     After all, you can take the piss out of the girl, but it can be a lot harder to take the girl out of... but perhaps that's too much information.