The Diver Good Pub Guide

STAR BARS

It's opening time for our team of dedicated after-dive drinking correspondents - Gavin "Wee Dram" Anderson, Dave "My Shout" Gwyer, John "Go On Then" Liddiard, Brendan "Swift Half" O'Brien and Tony "Last Orders" Sutton. Dr Peter Wilmshurst keeps a watchful eye on proceedings, and in the chair to introduce the Diver Good Pub Guide is Andy "Perhaps a Small Shandy" Blackford...

When they asked me to write about drinking and diving, I was baffled. How did they mean, drinking and diving? Aren't they the same thing?
But then I reflected that I must be getting old, and that times have changed since I was a glassy-eyed and slightly unstable novice. Diving, like every other sphere of life, has been infected from across the Atlantic by Political Correctness.
It started off in the world of business with the demise of the Three Martini Lunch. When I was a junior executive in advertising, you were expected to write off the afternoon in a sort of Anglo-Saxon siesta, which you spent unconscious rather than asleep.
Today, stressed and haggard account managers vie with one another in Perrier-ordering contests to prove how focused they are. I blame it on the Accountants who, in 1990, routed the Fun-Loving Creative Types in a secret coup.
Like the e coli bacterium, the infection spread with a terrifying rapidity, poisoning every pastime, withering every little pleasure.
Diving was not exempt. Suddenly, we were all expected to be Grown-Up and Responsible. The officious marshal with a heart like a walnut, who dreamed of becoming a traffic warden but lacked the academic qualifications, was handed a licence to push the rest of us about. "If I smell alcohol on yer breath, yer not bloody diving! No way, Ho-zay! Got that?"
It didn't matter that you had the water confidence of a hydrophobic hamster, that you had your mask on back to front, that you'd attached your DV to the HP outlet. You could night-dive to 40m in a six-knot tide, just so long as you hadn't sipped a half of lager shandy with lunch.
I recently attended the funeral of Ted Welch, a truly great diver. By "great", I don't mean he could stay down longer than anyone else, or that he raised the wreck of the Marie Celeste. I mean that he inspired a whole generation of us to dive, and to dive together as a club, and to drink and sulk and laugh and squabble together as friends. That's why, 20 years on, the church was full to bursting with moist-eyed mourners.
As we shivered together outside in the Garden of Remembrance, a grizzled and piratical old diver leaned over to me and whispered: "By God, I'll miss Ted. He was the only bugger in the branch who took brandy and fags on the boat with 'im."
I don't think I'd have got through my basic training without alcohol. I spent the whole two-week course in a state of gibbering panic, eternally failing to clear a flooding mask, ditching my weightbelt in 20m, having my air turned off by my Israeli commando instructor. Only in the evening, after consuming six bottles of lunatic soup, did I become the fearless, hairy-arsed aquanaut you know and admire today.
In the end, the combination of saltwater immersion by day and alcohol poisoning by night brought me down with acute dehydration. Apparently it's quite common among traumatised novices. They carried me to the lavatory, sat me on it, and poured water down my throat until it came out the other end.
Later, on branch dives, it was always the mirage of a pint of Stella, glass a-shimmer with condensation, that pulled me through a day on Chesil Beach.
It was like a cheap remake of Ice Cold In Alex. Lug the boat up Murder Mile in 80* heat, one step up, two steps back, down the other side to the water's edge, back for the engine, kit up, stagger back over the Pain Mountain, struggle into the boat between 2m waves, dive, then drive the boat, then dive again, then lug the engine and the boat back up the Hernia Himalayas... Finally, I'd crawl into the pub for the pint of Stella - and, nine times out of ten, be too knackered to drink it.
In Sturminster Parva Branch, the presence of a Good Pub is at least as important as the proximity of a decent dive site. I should explain that by "a good pub", the good men of Sturminster Parva did not mean your mass-produced family theme pub with its Korean hunting prints and its "home-baked" pies (baked on the premises but assembled on an industrial estate near Middlesborough) and Chicken Dinosaurs for the kiddies and a flame-effect fire and a bouncy castle in the car park.
No, they meant a proper pub with a proper, surly landlord and a brassy wife, where children were shot on sight with tranquilliser darts and sold into slavery, where the floor hosted an eternal battle between the spit and the sawdust, where a "bar snack" meant a three-year-old pickled egg and a bag of pork scratchings, where the beer pumps were better maintained than the branch compressor (much better) and where there reigned a profound silence, unsullied by the psychotic mantra of the fruit machine or the dissonant caterwaulings of pre-pubescent boy bands.
Even in the golden days of my novitiate, such places were few and far between. At the first hint of sunshine, every family in the land steers its Vectra straight for the nearest beach, so Good Pubs are seldom found within an hour's drive of the sea. We once towed three boats to Bromyard in Worcestershire, 120 miles inland, on the grounds that the Bashram Of Chattapore keeps the best pint of Barsted's Old Flyfumbler in the realm.
Over the years, alas, stocks of the Decent Hostelry have been further depleted, until a good diving pub is now rarer than a haddock in the Channel.
Which is why we at Diver felt it necessary to undertake an exhaustive programme of research and consultation, with the aim of identifying for our readers the last, few remaining oases of civilisation around our coastline.

DRINK DOES YOU GOOD...
... but only in moderation, says Dr Peter Wilmshurst
A small amount of alcohol drunk regularly (an ave of two units a day for women and up to three units daily for men) has some medical benefit, because it protects against coronary heart disease. Individuals who drink about those amounts live longer than those who abstain (one unit is equal to half a pint of beer, a glass of wine or a pub measure of spirit).

However, heavy drinkers have shortened life expectancy as a result of accidents and diseases, including liver cirrhosis. There is a particular association between alcohol and water sports leading to drowning. Individuals who are likely to have an elevated blood alcohol concentration should not be on or in the water.

In divers a raised blood alcohol concentration predisposes to nitrogen narcosis, which might therefore occur at a shallower depth. You should not be swimming or diving if you have recently been drinking alcohol. A significant blood alcohol concentration may be present if you were drinking heavily the night before.

Sleeping does not get rid of the alcohol in the body any more quickly. As a rule, those planning to dive should drink alcohol only in moderation, and no more than is normal for them.

LAST ORDERS
Even a selection of divers' drinking dens takes up a lot of space, so if we've missed out your favourite this time round, let us know about it, and what makes it special - we might just be forced to do a follow-up survey!
Write to us at Diver, 55 High Street, Teddington, Middlesex TW11 8HA, fax 0181 943 4312 or e-mail STEVE@DIVERMAG.CO.UK.

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Appeared in DIVER - May 1999