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BEETLE MANIA
LOUISE TREWAVAS
IMAGINE WAKING UP TO DISCOVER that you have metamorphosed into a giant beetle. What a bizarre idea!
Of course when it actually happened to me, my critique of Kafka and his famous novel came in for a bit of a hammering. If life imitates art, I'm the living proof.
I had returned from a cracking dive on the Rewa, emerging fully kitted from the diver lift and plonking myself down on the central engine cover that we use for kitting-up. The boat was rolling in the choppy Atlantic swell, and as I lifted my mask off my head I was pitched backwards.
With nothing to hang onto, gravity took over - I was pinned on my back, harnessed firmly into my rebreather and stage cylinder. No amount of frenzied arm- and leg-thrashing could over-rule basic physics: the kit weighed more than me. I had become an upturned beetle.
Of course, any sensible person would simply pop open the shoulder clips on their wing or BC to release themselves. Of course, being a tekkie, I don't have shoulder clips (extra points of failure!). I was stranded.
Even my huffing and puffing was beginning to resemble the sound of an insect trapped behind glass. The boys were happily chatting about engine parts and seemed oblivious to my struggle.
"Er... guys? Hello!" My voice had become insect-speak because nobody appeared to hear. Only by jabbing the toe of my drysuit boot up the skipper's nose could I get some assistance.
Once I was upright - and human again - the lads sprang to my assistance and helped me out of my gear. So why had none of them become beetles?
The problem was solved later in the pub, on the back of a fag packet and after a few drinks: K ³ BW x 1.3. Or, in plain English, Kafka's revenge occurs where K (the weight of your kit) is equal to, or greater than BW (your body weight) times 1.3.
At this point the boys started getting clever and building variables into the formula based on sea state and the relative grumpiness of the skipper. That part never got written up; I'd drunk another Bacardi Breezer and what was left of my brain had been transformed into a slug.
Dimly, I realised that this was not what I'd planned for my life at all.
I used to have a designer flat, which is now a thinly disguised dive locker. I used to relax in Islington cafés, discussing Foucault and Sartre; now my main conversational gambit is an encyclopaedic knowledge of the UK's motorways, lightened only by an in-depth review of every service station between London and Oban.
I've transformed into a beetle. I've become a motorway geek. Diving has created an existential crisis and I appear destined to become everything that I once despised.
I was consoling myself with the thought that it couldn't get any more humiliating, until I was sifting through some photos with Marky Mark.
Now most of us like to think of ourselves as unique (and a bit special). But looking through the underwater pics of our diving trips, I began to realise that technical diving throws up a certain identity problem.
Dressed in that amount of kit, it's difficult to tell who is who. People become distinctive only by the colour of their fins or drysuits. And being tekkies, we have all opted for black.
"I can tell it's you because you always have a few fronds of blonde hair escaping from under your hood at the front and floating about," he said. "It's kind of like..."
Like a sea anemone? Like a mermaid?
"... like that pink furry monster that plays the drums." That's when it dawns on me - the ultimate indignity. I've become a muppet.
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