Ritorno!

Diving in Pula and culture in Venice:

• Pula
  • Ryanair strikes again
  • FEF_25-75% be damned
  • Man vs. mosquito part I
• Venice
• Venetian blind

Baby's got the bends / oh no (she doesn't)

Having ditched our luggage we sought out the diving school, situated down on the waterfront and in the shadow of the awesomely retro Hotel Histria. The hairy-chested manager pointed us through the TV lounge (it has a TV lounge! Excellent) and down the stairs, where we came upon it on a short stretch of concrete promenade covered with lobster-red Germans. The view across the bay was Mediterranean in the extreme: blue sky, bluer sea, pale rocks and dark green trees.

Ash, an out of practice rescue diver, had booked a refresher dive for the next morning, and after some discussion with (i.e. good-natured derisive snorting from) the attendant diving instructors, I was throwing caution and medical advice to wind and doing a beginner's "discovery" dive after lunch. I hung around while Ash got kitted out, helped them lumber down into the shallows and watched with increasing surprise as they took a few experimental breaths and sank beneath the waves. It's not that you don't know that this is what happens, but to see your girlfriend disappear with the merest traces of bubbles left behind is rather unnerving. I half expected them all to come up for a big breath any second; they didn't, so I took a seat among the barbequing sunbathers to wait for them.

After about forty minutes they surfaced again and I could tell Ash wasn't all that impressed. Apparently, Marco the guide was disinterested and workmanlike, the house "reef" was mostly a pile of rocks and the fauna (listlessly prodded by Marco, which is apparently considered extremely bad form by PADI) was restricted to some hermit crabs and the odd starfish.

I had a different guide: a friendly Dutch guy called Patrick who was both enthusiastic and serious about diving. We did a half hour of theory, most of which seemed sensible to a lapsed physicist like your correspondent (main take-home tip: fail to breathe out as you ascend and your lungs will explode), along with a few signs meaning "OK", "My ears hurt" and "It's getting a bit tricky" among others. The gist of the dive itself was that he'd hold onto my left arm the whole time and also manage my buoyancy by inflating or deflating my BCD for me. All I had to do was to swim in the directions he indicated and try not to freak out.

I got into my wetsuit, complete with hilariously ripped ass seam, and waddled down the the stony beach. It's not obvious when watching experienced divers, but in the shallows you're about as mobile as a newborn baby. I floundered around like a beached whale trying to put my fins on, eventually coming to a vaguely composed halt by kneeling on a rock with Ash's help while I waited for Patrick to get ready. "Put on your mask," he said, "try out the regulator by sticking your face in the water."

Here goes then, I thought. I put the regulator in my mouth and took a couple of exploratory breaths; it seemed fairly natural above water, although you do need to breathe in fairly emphatically to start the air flowing each time. I stuck my head in the water and lasted for about three breaths, reflexively jerking my head back out again exactly when a single lungful of air would have run out.

"OK?" asked Patrick.
"Yup!! "It's weird! It's very weird," I prattled. I didn't know how to phrase "Good God, what the hell have I agreed to here?" such that it didn't sound bad, so beyond that I kept my trap shut.
"You'll be okay. Now what we're going to do is we're going to swim out to that pontoon" - he pointed to the edge of the floating pier, maybe ten metres away - "face down, with our jackets filled with air so we're buoyant, then we'll stop and dive to a sandy bowl about six metres down."

I listened, mechanically put the regulator back in my mouth and swam with him over to the pier. With the air tanks on our backs we were mostly submerged and there was no way to avoid breathing entirely through the regulator. Through my mask I watched the sea bed slide past and drop away from us and the whole time (although it was only about thirty seconds) tried to ignore the part of my brain emitting a continuous silent scream. We got to the end of the pier and righted ourselves so we were bobbing vertically on the surface, the water rolling around at mask level. I snatched a couple of breaths of fresh air, not quite believing what we'd just done.

"OK?" the instructor signed.
"OK!!" I twitched back.

He pointed down with his thumb, indicating that we were about to dive, then deflated my BCD and his BCD in turn. We dropped slowly downwards and I concentrated very, very hard on swallowing to equalise the pressure in my ears while breathing as regularly as I could. The mental effort almost exactly balanced the urge to freak out, so that for that first descent I was teetering on the edge of a sort of existential rather than physical panic.

The number of different sensations is overwhelming: the effort needed to breathe through the regulator initially feels like shortness of breath, while the mouthpiece itself is pulled slightly to one side by the hose and threatens to come out if you relax your jaw for a second. The exhaled bubbles rush past your ears with a deafening roar, your inner ear snaps, crackles and pops as the pressure changes and the water swilling around the bottom of your mask makes it feel like something critical is leaking. Oh, and being completely submerged - not only that, but six metres below the surface - leads to utterly perfect cognitive dissonance. "Why am I not drowning?" your brain quite reasonably asks. "You've got me," you reply. And there's another curiosity: you can't talk to your diving buddy, so all of your conversations are with yourself: the internal monologue becomes a dialogue.

"Holy crap, this is weird."
"I know! You don't have to tell me twice."

We settled on the bottom in the patch of sand. Patrick inflated my BCD until I was more or less neutrally buoyant and motioned for me to swing up so I was horizontal, facing the sea floor; he did the same and we slowly kicked off.

I'd managed to wall off my incredulity by now and followed his lead as we swam forwards and down, popping my ears all the while. We pointed (with slightly disproportionate enthusiasm) at the fish and crustaceans we saw along the way.

"There! Could that be a herring?"
"My word! I do believe it is a veritable shoal of them."

Stopping on the bottom again a few minutes later, he pointed at his depth gauge: 14.6m! As I looked up at the cloud of bubbles floating up to the barely visible surface, I had the thought that "I could just take the regulator out at any time," in exactly the same way that when peering over the edge of, say, the Grand Canyon you might be inclined to think "it would be so easy to jump." The fact the I didn't immediately spit out the mouthpiece reassured me greatly.

Patrick gave me the thumbs up and we followed our bubbles to the surface, my ears crackling as they equalised themselves. We popped up on the other side of the floating pier, I ripped off my mask and, oddly worried that I might suddenly be unable to breathe, took out the regulator. "Well done!" he said, "that was about seventeen minutes, you've used about a third more oxygen than me and we got to 14.6 metres. How do you feel?"

"Intrigued," was the best way I could put it. I don't know if I could call it fun - I was too busy suppressing the urge to wig out most of the time - but it was such a novel experience that we're already talking about a diving trip next year!

Update: Hooray! We remembered my instructor's name, and it is Patrick.

"The sheer bloody awfulness of air travel..."

...is a phrase I once read in a newspaper article, uttered with confidence by the head of Eurotunnel, and that seems particularly apt to the journey Ash and I made to get to Croatia last week. Until Ryanair (remember them?) moved forward by two hours their single weekly flight to Pula, we had an early but feasible start to get to Stansted and then to fly on to Croatia that same day. After they moved it, we not only had to book new flights to London for the night before, but we were faced by the choice of spending the night in the airport or finding a hotel near Stansted. (easyJet's cancellation fees are so high it was cheaper to buy entirely new flights - and the aviation industry is whining about being scapegoated for carbon emissions? No wonder, when it's cheaper to leave seats empty than to amend a booking.)

Turns out there are no hotels near Stansted; at least, none costing less than £150 per night. With neither standby rates nor in fact any rooms available at the exorbitant inn, we spent a truly grim night on a plastic bench in Domestic Arrivals, kept awake - or rather, in a hideous semi-waking nightmare - by a hippie student arythmically banging a djembe so his compadres could practice capoeira into the small hours.

For the record, they were all crap at it.

We slept through the flight and woke up circling Pula International. The plane went from temperate to sauna as the doors opened and we ambled slowly across the scorching apron to the single gate. The airport is small, plain and refreshingly matter-of-fact: there are no airbridges, covered walkways, shuttles to the terminal or any of that jazz: if you get sucked into a jet engine then it's your own fault for displaying such rank carelessness. We got on a ancient transfer coach (either it or the equally ancient driver had an inbuilt speed limit of about 40kph) and trundled to Pula bus station.

Our accommodation for the first few nights was south of Pula, in an area called Punta Verudela. Despite having booked everything months in advance, we were almost studiedly unprepared for everything after the transfer bus and it took us two hours of blistered feet, aimless wandering and constant whining from yours truly (I will never wear flip-flops again, I can tell you that much) until we finally collapsed, sweating and exhausted, in our '70s apartment.

Flat pack:

It's not every week one hangs on a knife edge between solvency and debt to the tune of £100k. In other words, having given up on buying a place in Auld Reekie (it's not so much a property ladder here as a greasy pole), I've put in a note of interest on a flat over in the benighted west. My affable solicitor, who is clearly far more used to handling sums of money that make the eyes water than I am, assures me that there will a decision, for better or for worse, by the beginning of next week. Fingers crossed and buttocks clenched, I await his call.

What with interminable trips through to Glasgow to look at flat after flat, the week has shot by without leaving much of an impression on me. The highlights: Annabel and Antonio are both leaving imminently, so we headed along to the Cumberland for some pints and reminiscing; for Father's Day la famille had a sedate Sunday lunch in the tourist heaven/resident hell of South Queensferry, and on Tuesday night we went out with Josh, up for a few days from the Big Smoke.

Josh filled me in on what sounds like a worthy successor to 2005's Berlin trip and we meandered onto rather more geekish ground, as is our nerdy wont. He waxed lyrical about the virtues of Facebook for a while, but I must admit I can't see the attraction. At this point I'd normally start on a gentle, nostalgic rant about the good old days of the more informal web, but I have to catch a bus for the first leg of our long-overdue summer holiday. Adieu!

Week(end) inversion:

I did nothing at the weekend. I'm glossing over a letterbox-eyed, four-hour Resident Evil 4 session (we had to break the TV in somehow, and MGS3 is just so dashed cerebral sometimes) but in effect, we wore a path from the couch to the kitchen and back for two days straight. Lofty plans of a picnic on Arthur's Seat and a visit to the Taste of Edinburgh festival came and went without a whimper. In short, a slothful, indulgent and pleasurable weekend, but nothing to write home about. Happily, the week was substitute enough.

On Tuesday Ash and I went for a post-work drink in the Blind Poet and then headed across the road to Phenecia to stuff ourselves silly with garlic-bomb houmous and tzatziki. It's been a while since we've been out for a meal together and I really enjoyed it! We had the restaurant to ourselves and the waitress gave us exactly the right amount of inattention. I attempted heroically but failed to clean my heaping plate (a Little Chef/free lollipop bit of Pavlovian conditioning if ever I saw it) and so replete with North African comfort food we took a slightly desperate stroll home in the damp evening air to ward off the threatened gastric distress. The Phenecian Gentlemen's Club (of which I was a sub-associate honourary member or something) may be gone, but it is not forgotten!

Davis came over to the flat for recording duty on Thursday night so I could finish off a couple more bass lines for our demo. We drank cheap red wine, talked Macs and fiddled with cabling and I even managed to get some bass playing in amongst it all. Almost as an afterthought I asked about and Davis showed me some basic blues soloing; I was flabbergasted by the simplicity of it and yet utterly incapable of using it to any great effect. So, not only is the 'Fynn website back up but we have a demo tape/CD/web page/whatever in the offing and come the next gig I shall gamely ruin Locomotive Blues with an abortive attempt at "improvisation". Full steam ahead!

Back in black:

Coba Fynn are back in action. Having said that, don't bother clicking on that link just yet - our esteemed internet host switched us to a different server recently, breaking our site in the process. Normal service should be resumed in a day or two.

Anyway, we managed a more productive return to form in a mini rehearsal/recording session on Sunday. Davis had mixed down some tracks from our last session, so I took the opportunity to monopolize the afternoon for the purposes of laying down the bass lines to a few songs. We stuck to the easy ones (rather a relief after two months of failing to practice) but I was still surprised at how good they're sounding. It may just be the case that after almost four years of trying I've finally reached the giddy heights of mediocrity. With a bit of luck (and a functioning website) we'll have some choons up for your edification and enjoyment within a month or so!

And other than that, things are ticking along quite nicely, thank you very much: 28 Weeks Later is bloody good (har har); being evacuated from the cinema because of a fire alarm is not; mid-afternoon drinks in the Star Bar are good; recovery is not.