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THE SIMPLE LIFE
LOUISE TREWAVAS
THE KEY TO MODERN LIFE IS TO KEEP IT SIMPLE. That's according to the Dalai Lama - but it isn't necessarily the message in your diver training manual. Diving, after all, is a sport that thrives on making life complicated. And the Dalai Lama hasn't even passed his Open Water, so what would he know?
Those lovely old black and white photos of happy divers in swimming costumes, sporting a minimal amount of basic kit, should make us feel ashamed of our excesses. But no. We marvel only at their ability to dive out of Weymouth in a state of virtual nakedness, and still muster a smile.
At the same time, we're waxing the zips of our drysuits, searching for those crucial ankle weights, and attaching a vast array of gadgets to our BCs with curly cord and clips. As a shopaholic dive-junkie, I find it quite disturbing that I still have no clue what most of the objects on those twirly stands or wall displays in dive shops actually do.
Who is buying this stuff? Who dreams up these unfathomable knick-knacks? If we all refused to buy them, would an entire manufacturing district of China be forced to shut down operations?
My personal purchasing habits alone are probably sustaining the population of a small town. If only they'd stop making this crap and come and help me load it into the car for my next dive trip!
What I find puzzling is that even when every item imaginable has been packed, my house still appears to contain enough dive equipment to stock a small PADI resort centre. It's inexplicable. How did the sport that started life as "underwater swimming" end up so involved?
It appears to make no sense, because diving is a simple process. You jump in and descend. You clear your ears. You breathe in and out normally. You avoid running out of gas. You ascend slow-ow-owly. That's basically it!
Even neutral buoyancy, is very much an optional extra, as you'll be aware if you've been to the Red Sea and witnessed divers arriving with a thud on the Thistlegorm. or stomping around the Ghiannis D.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to describe neutral buoyancy as an alien concept. Have you noticed that divers from nations where the very idea of neutrality is foreign and bizarre tend to dive like doughnuts?
Speaking of doughnuts - let's give credit where it's due - nobody can touch the Americans when it comes to inventing the enhancements we never knew we needed.
There's a rear-view mirror to stick on your mask so that you don't have to turn your head, and a bottle of liquid defogger so you don't have to exhaust yourself by spitting. Battery-powered mini-propellers can be strapped to your legs so that you don't need to fin.
They've invented an ingenious and extremely expensive device that allows you to key in the depth you want to be at. It stabilises your buoyancy at that depth, saving all that faffing around with your BC.
There's a special valve that saves you the strain of having to tip your head back when clearing your mask. And a clever "telescopic" snorkel, that - like every other snorkel - sits forgotten in the rusty sludge and bits of broken fin-strap at the bottom of your dive crate, only more neatly.
Well it's easy to scoff. And judging by the obesity statistics, most Americans do. But perhaps it's no coincidence that the inventions appear, almost universally, to be aimed at making our diving lives simpler by selling us lots of extra bits, while removing the need for any actual effort or skill.
Whatever next? With an attitude like that, let's just hope that the Americans never turn their attention to diving courses.
Ooh, hang on...
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