Dive 1

Or

Why I took it up.

This is another tale that has its genesis in my childhood. As a youngster at school I would regularly paint (during art class) pictures of spacemen (this being at the height of the Apollo missions), and, as they were termed in those days, frogmen, usually floating above a huge chest of pirate treasure stuffed with pieces-of-eight and gold doubloons, whatever they were???? Some sort of coin I surmised at the time. I was right, too. There was usually a trail of bubbles coming from the frogman’s head and a few bizarre looking fish pootling about. All very colourful.

The Space Race® was at full tilt. It was all over the telly and every other media outlet. There weren’t many of those in the late 60s or early 70s. TV, radio, magazines and newspapers. That was it. No computers, no mobile phones and certainly no internet. That was all unthinkable and belonged to the future when we would all wear silver suits, eat pills for our meals, travel everywhere by jet-pack and live on the moon (presumably to get away from the ubiquitous browness of the decade, as well as hotpants, The Bay City Rollers and The Osmonds). Anyway, I naturally wanted to join in the Space Race®  and be an astronaut. Being from the outskirts of Manchester I would probably have been a Suburban Spaceman (baby).

As the years passed the Space Race® died and with it my enthusiasm for all things astro based. Other, more pragmatic and prosaic enthusiasms took hold; Airfix kits, reading, swimming, golf (briefly), stamp collecting (very briefly), and.…well…..just being a kid and mucking about. Life continued through adolescence in to adulthood and on to my early 30s.

Then my dad died.

He was only 60. It was totally unexpected. He’d found blood in his stools and went to see the Doctor. An operation was scheduled to remove a tumour and all went well. Then it was discovered that he was still bleeding internally. A second operation took place a day after the first. His body went in to shock and he never recovered. He was kept in intensive care, all the usual gubbins, wires and pipes and machinery, connected to him, in him and around him. I came back early from a trip to Ireland. Then one day his body decided to stop. He was resuscitated. We gathered at the hospital and decided that the next time his body stopped we’d leave it stopped. No point prolonging the agony for it to happen again and again. Let him die with some dignity.He died that afternoon.

We can never be sure whether he would have recovered. The prognosis was not good. It was discovered that the tumour was malignant. It was probably better that he died when he did rather than go through a long, slow, painful decline, in and out of hospital for cancer treatments and the debilitating side effects that ensue. He would have hated all that. He was a fit and active man, always on the go. The frustration would have been intolerable.

He left my mum comfortably provided for. He’d worked bloody hard, and successfully, all his life. Some money came to me and my sister. A good proportion I saved, I spent some on a new bike and decided to be adventurous with the rest.

I went SCUBA diving (I think he would have liked that).