13th August 2007
The SCUBA has landed
Imagine yourself underwater in a deep pool, able to see and breathe normally. Sunlight is making pretty patterns on the surface of the water when you look up. All is calm and quiet. In the corner, a black-clad figure pirouettes slowly, upside down. On the other side of the pool, two more are flapping their fins pathetically and pointlessly (and sometimes their hands as well) in an attempt to sideways. An instructor patiently adjusts the buoyancy of a particularly clueless frogman in the middle of the pool so that they go down instead of up, and a shape vaguely reminiscent of a reclining Reubens figure spray-painted with black foam drifts sideways through my field of view. This is my second scuba class in the pool.
Scuba is mostly about propelling yourself along in a portable bath heated by your own body, while experiencing Boyle's law in a particularly personal manner. The water layer between your wetsuit and your skin is only a few millimetres thick, so dewberry bubble bath and exfoliating scrub are probably not a good idea. Thinking about it though, there are probably posh beauty salons where you could pay a week's wage to sit for an hour in a wetsuit filled with jojoba oil, with complimentary panpipe music seeping into any remaining spaces. Let's just say that it would not be my cup of tea.
This black-foam-fish existence is supposedly my key to the oceans though. Reading has its limits. Sooner or later it is going to be necessary to come sucker-to-mask with an octopus in order to really understand what it is really up to. It is probably not up to very much, and perhaps it doesn't have a garden after all, but it won't hurt to check. There might not be much room left in my cluttered little brain for the full reality of the other two thirds of the planet's surface, but perhaps I'll find space in the mental equivalent of the attic. I'm sure that you could fit a whale in an attic. Oh yes. Three hundred million cubic miles of water, I'm not so sure about, but I'll worry about that later. These thoughts drift in slow and serene chaotic patterns around my mind, rather like my classmates are doing in the pool. Meanwhile, the kindergarten-style class continues. Occasionally while everyone else is waiting in a circle at the surface watching a demonstration, a sudden whoosh in the middle announces the late arrival of a lost soul from the bottom. I float there, cheerfully anticipating the voice of Joyce Grenfell as school mistress to emerge from the heavens: "George! DON'T do that".
