Scuba baby!

In an uncharacteristically adventurous move, Chris and I tried scuba diving on Saturday. It was great! We both really enjoyed it. Although we didn't manage to get photos of ourselves in full scuba gear, behold me in a wetsuit:

We would never normally have thought "I know, let's go on a scuba taster session" of course; it was a present from Chris' Mum. She bought Chris one of those 'experience gift' things where you choose from a selection of activities to do like driving a racing car or clay pigeon shooting or whatever. We picked scuba diving because most of the options were a bit manly and not that interesting to us.

It was at a scuba diving centre near Gatwick, and kicked off with a bit of (quite scary) theory in a classroom where they tell you what would happen to the airspaces in your body if you didn't equalise the pressure on the way down and up. Saying "your lungs might explode, but of course that won't happen today" always fills you with confidence! And then we had about half an hour in their diving pool, starting off just with putting your face in the water and breathing through the mouthpiece thingy, and building up to swimming around at the bottom and removing the mouthpiece from your mouth for a minute then putting it back in again.

It was a really nice gentle introduction to see if you like it, and then if you want to go back and do a proper course to qualify you as an Open Water Diver then you can. It was a lovely feeling being able to swim around without needing to go back up, and I didn't find it difficult at all to get used to breathing underwater. I wish we could have had just a little bit longer in the water really.

I don't know if we'll go back and do the course. Maybe. It's not that expensive, but it's only worth doing if you're planning on diving somewhere like on holiday, and it takes two days to complete it. Chris really liked it lots, so we'll see. It would be nice to go and dive somewhere exotic with coral and fishes and things, even if I would be a bit scared of being mauled by sharks. I've seen Open Water you know.

Blogging catch-up

It's been ages since I wrote something on my blog, so I thought I'd better make the effort to post a little something today. Largely it's because I haven't been at work, where I'm sat in front of a computer all day with nothing better to do than bore you all with my daily doings.

I've had quite a nice week off, and I've done quite a few things, although as always it feels like the time has gone really quickly.

I've been camping in Essex, which was quite fun. I'm still not hugely keen on sleeping in a tent though, particularly as I was nearly asphixiated at 5am by it. I was worried that we'd be cold, so I closed all the flaps up apart from the "vent" in the top, not realising however that the vent did absolutely nothing at all. So after four hours of sleep our oxygen had been entirely depleted, and I started to have an odd dream where I was breathing but nothing was going in. And then I woke up with a start and found that I could indeed inhale quite happily, but was still nearly on the point of passing out from lack of oxygen. Stupid tent. A few minutes of panting on the grass after ripping the door open and all was well again, but it still wasn't much fun.

I've also had a couple of nice nights out, accompanied by the obligatory not-so-nice mornings after. We actually managed to get to Pop Kraft, Boogaloo Stu's new Brighton night, this weekend and it was really good! Great pop music, porno badges, and free jelly beans, what more could you want? I'll definitely try to go again, especially to the Saturday special they do sometimes. I'm not sure I can handle clubbing on a Thursday night any more.

I went to Revenge as well recently, the first time I've been there in ages. It was only okay I have to say. They have a nice new roof terrace now, which is quite pleasant when you need a rest, but consequently you can no longer leave the club and get stamped to come back in. We used to like that, because then you could flit around between Revenge and Vavoom and anywhere else that took your fancy without being pinned down in one place. It also seems that Revenge has become very lesbian in recent months. Not that I mind lesbians as a general rule of course, I know some very nice ones, but there's a certain kind of lesbian that Revenge attracts in droves that really REALLY pisses me off. They're generally of less than average height, and they seem to have developed the notion that everyone is going to persecute them. They therefore exhibit an unnecessary level of pre-emptive aggression in order to ward you off, and it's fucking annoying! There's just no need for it. Often they take up far more than their fair share of the dance floor, they dance wildly, and they SHOVE if you get too near them. But woe betide you if you should shove them back, oh no, because then you get an earful off an overweight cluster of snaggle-toothed sweaty faced little dwarves. And if Pink comes on, the apparent music of choice for these marauding herds of wildebeests, you better run for it because then they flail and mosh and elbow even harder than usual.

So it put me off a bit to be honest. I'll probably still go occasionally, but I don't rate Revenge any more really. That doesn't leave many options for clubbing really though: Legends is alright but I don't like the smug pug-faced man who owns it and it's generally quite an old crowd in there; Charles Street is only open certain nights; and Ghetto used to be very good but seems to be dead all the time now. So er... that's no good gay clubs left. No wonder people aren't going out like they used to.

Anyway, I'm back to work tomorrow after my week and a half off. I've just waded through my emails and deleted the most twatty and irrelevant, and my backlog doesn't look too bad. It's amazing how quickly I can get annoyed with work again though, when I'm not even there yet! "Oh this webpage still says this, that's really wrong now, it should have been taken down a couple of weeks ago". Er did you ask me to take it down? No! I'm not psychic dear.

Still, I at least only have a three-day week again this week. I'm then going on an introduction to scuba diving (yes, you heard me!) next Saturday, followed by another wedding reception in the evening, so that should be quite good.

I shall try to blog more often in the interim, as I don't like to think of you all forlornly clicking on refresh every ten minutes to see if I've posted anything new and being disappointed.