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KNOW YOUR ENEMY
LOUISE TREWAVAS
AT ONE TIME, THE BIGGEST THREAT to my budding diving career was chlorine in the pool. It was a simpler time, when concerns about blotchy skin, sore eyes and split ends dominated my world.
As the diving bug bit hard, I felt the need to buy large quantities of kit and dive at every opportunity. Like any addict, my next enemy quickly became lack of money.
Having acquired the contents of a small dive shop, and with plenty of diving opportunities on offer, the unpredictable British weather proved to be the villain of the piece.
I found myself relentlessly surfing meteorological websites in the same frenzied manner that others browse porn. It's all a bit predictable, but the promise of excitement would draw me in.
I couldn't stop looking; something interesting might happen next...
And when people asking about my weekend were met with the constant refrain: "I got blown out", I think they seriously began to wonder. If only I could return to such days of innocence!
After some amateur skirmishes in the mucky arena of dive-club politics, I fell smack into the Dante's Inferno that is technical diving. The dives may be heavenly, but the snobbery, cronyism, elitism, prejudice, fundamentalism and good old-fashioned bullying that go with them could rival the plot of The Da Vinci Code.
It feels as if some of the soundest, most fascinating people in the world have been stirred into the mix with some of the most vile, and there is no map to help you navigate towards one without encountering the other.
But self-obsessed tekkyism isn't the real enemy, it's just a lure. I've had to look beyond diving to find the powerful forces of darkness.
Politicians, rubbish journalists, megalomaniac archaeologists, Portland Port Authority and the Ministry of Defence: they all pose a regular threat to divers. They embody evil. More horrifying still, they're actually just us in a suit, rather than us in a drysuit.
But the minute you think you know your enemy, an unexpected attack robs you of that delusion. The biggest exposure that diving is getting at the moment comes courtesy of an HSBC advertising campaign. It offers a vision of diver-soup syndrome that was uncannily echoed on the cover of one of those diving magazines that land, uninvited, on my doormat.
So that will help overcome negative perceptions and promote the sport! With friends like these, who needs enemies?
Perhaps the harder truth behind the HSBC ad is that people find divers rather comical: frogmen flapping about in funny outfits. An Evolution rebreather might get voted into the top 100 cool things by a lad's mag, but divers just aren't cool.
It would be great for diving to be considered as cool as surfing, but imagine all the time that would be wasted preening and posing on the boat. Add in the kit-fettling, and no-one would ever get off it!
"What would happen if we all saved for the same thing?" demands the HSBC. Well, banks would probably go bust, because they rely on us spending on credit to make their profits. So watch your words, HSBC - they have a habit of returning to bite you in the arse.
If the HSBC vision came true, and stacks of people took up diving, we'd have to adopt some new collective nouns. What do you call a large collection of dive-boats - a site swarm? Or is it a rabble of RIBs?
And what should we call a big bunch of divers? A dunk? A skive?
As for bankers, I think they come in a wunch.
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