Events what have eventuated
May. 26th, 2009 07:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shermaramaGood grief, Hollyoaks is a piece of festering shit. It's ridiculously plotted, shoddily scripted and woodenly acted. Insofar as I can ever make out any of the characters, and there seems to be a whole bunch of different ones every time I happen to be in the lounge when it's on, they all seem to be people I have no interest in knowing anything about. My flatmate watches it, though, and this is the first evening since last Monday that I've actually sat down in front of the telly after tea, so I can put up with it for half an hour. Probably.
So last Tuesday was a pub tour of Belsize Park with CAMRA people; the Sir Richard Steele was probably the best, if you're in that area. On Wednesday I went to Cambridge for the beer festival and the beer, the company and bypassing the queue on account of being a CAMRA member were all great. Even the train journey was enjoyable, particularly because of the book I'm reading at the moment, The Last Witchfinder by James Morrow. I'm not sure it's a good book, or as clever as it thinks it is, but it's certainly entertaining.
Thursday night mainly involved carrying out endless bits of diving club stuff like finishing a trip report, sorting out the money for the last weekend trip and herding equipment for the one coming up. Plus a certain amount of sitting around in the pub, but still. Friday then involved getting up, putting everything in the car and driving to Plymouth. We got there before everyone else, failed to fix a recalcitrant U-bolt and eventually launched the boats (I had to do the actual van-controlling bit of one of the launches, which was exciting) and got to go and find where we were staying.
There are two pubs in Turnchapel, the little village next to the Mount Batten Centre where we were diving from, and both do B&B. One is the Boringdon Arms, an old-school pub with a slightly surly bloke called Barry in charge and a lot of young local lasses for staff. The food is served in hearty portions but isn't terribly inspiring. The entertainment included a pub quiz and an act called Two's Company who specialised in murdering songs to backing tracks on a laptop through a mike with glitter crystals glued all over it. We've stayed there before and the rooms are cheap, but basic and not en-suite. This time were staying in the other place, the Clovelly Bay Inn. It seems to be run by a bloke about my age and his somewhat pregnant wife, and there's an older couple around who may be one or the other's parents, I suspect. When we got there at half nine we asked if we could get some food, just a bowl of chips or the like, but the kitchen was closed for the night and they were totally out of chips. Never mind, we said, and sat down with a couple of very nice pints, but the bloke had a word with his missus, and she had a rummage, and shortly we found ourselves in front of a couple of breasts of coq au vin with thick slices of buttered bread. It was extremely tasty and they wouldn't take any money for it because it was leftovers. The rooms were slightly more expensive but en-suite and comfortable, and the breakfasts were excellent too. For some reason, though, the drinking and eating we did as a group was all in the other place. The club's been going to the Bori for a long time, but I'd be happy to lead the defection, myself.
This weekend was spring tides, very springy spring tides with one of the lowest tides of the year on Monday. That meant having to get to dive sites in the very small window of slack water, and in this case having to get up bloody early to do it. I woke up before 7 for three days running, in the alleged pursuit of leisure. Still, that meant finishing early too, so on one night we had time to go shopping after the second dive and have a barbecue up on the castle mound in the evening sunshine. As for the dives themselves, they weren't the best ones I've ever done but the reasons for that were not directly associated with the dives. There was a bit of a plankton soup going on, which reduced the visibility, but it meant there were basking sharks lurking around the Eddystone. One dive got a bit truncated due to getting stuck in a strong current, a result of the springy springs, and there were two others where I was supposedly leading but I'd never dived the sites before which made it a bit tricky to do properly. Also I've been having a problem for a while with headaches when I dive. There are long lists of things that can cause headaches when diving, and a common culprit is breathing. Skip breathing, trying to hold your breath to reduce air consumption, can be a problem, and so can breathing too much, for example when going to deeper depths or leading a dive when you're not used to it and therefore nervous, but also thinking about your breathing too much can cause headaches because it overrides your automatic carbon dioxide regulation mechanisms. Pffft. So I was trying not to breathe either too much or too little while not thinking about my breathing too much, and coming up with varying degrees of headache from the mildly irritating to the incapacitating. Now, another of the things on the list of things that can cause headaches is your mask being too tight. The strap clips on my mask are perfectly fine in that they stop the strap pulling out when it's on my head, but when I had a look at it just before the last dive, I think they don't stop it wandering around when it's not under tension, so it had spontaneously tightened itself. I'm not declaring the problem definitively solved yet, but I loosened off the mask before the last dive and came up headacheless, so perhaps all that arsing around with breathing was unnecessary.
And now I'm back here and have spent the entire evening watching telly, reading the internet and writing this post, with a small amount of rinsing things out and putting them on the balcony to dry. Nice.
So last Tuesday was a pub tour of Belsize Park with CAMRA people; the Sir Richard Steele was probably the best, if you're in that area. On Wednesday I went to Cambridge for the beer festival and the beer, the company and bypassing the queue on account of being a CAMRA member were all great. Even the train journey was enjoyable, particularly because of the book I'm reading at the moment, The Last Witchfinder by James Morrow. I'm not sure it's a good book, or as clever as it thinks it is, but it's certainly entertaining.
Thursday night mainly involved carrying out endless bits of diving club stuff like finishing a trip report, sorting out the money for the last weekend trip and herding equipment for the one coming up. Plus a certain amount of sitting around in the pub, but still. Friday then involved getting up, putting everything in the car and driving to Plymouth. We got there before everyone else, failed to fix a recalcitrant U-bolt and eventually launched the boats (I had to do the actual van-controlling bit of one of the launches, which was exciting) and got to go and find where we were staying.
There are two pubs in Turnchapel, the little village next to the Mount Batten Centre where we were diving from, and both do B&B. One is the Boringdon Arms, an old-school pub with a slightly surly bloke called Barry in charge and a lot of young local lasses for staff. The food is served in hearty portions but isn't terribly inspiring. The entertainment included a pub quiz and an act called Two's Company who specialised in murdering songs to backing tracks on a laptop through a mike with glitter crystals glued all over it. We've stayed there before and the rooms are cheap, but basic and not en-suite. This time were staying in the other place, the Clovelly Bay Inn. It seems to be run by a bloke about my age and his somewhat pregnant wife, and there's an older couple around who may be one or the other's parents, I suspect. When we got there at half nine we asked if we could get some food, just a bowl of chips or the like, but the kitchen was closed for the night and they were totally out of chips. Never mind, we said, and sat down with a couple of very nice pints, but the bloke had a word with his missus, and she had a rummage, and shortly we found ourselves in front of a couple of breasts of coq au vin with thick slices of buttered bread. It was extremely tasty and they wouldn't take any money for it because it was leftovers. The rooms were slightly more expensive but en-suite and comfortable, and the breakfasts were excellent too. For some reason, though, the drinking and eating we did as a group was all in the other place. The club's been going to the Bori for a long time, but I'd be happy to lead the defection, myself.
This weekend was spring tides, very springy spring tides with one of the lowest tides of the year on Monday. That meant having to get to dive sites in the very small window of slack water, and in this case having to get up bloody early to do it. I woke up before 7 for three days running, in the alleged pursuit of leisure. Still, that meant finishing early too, so on one night we had time to go shopping after the second dive and have a barbecue up on the castle mound in the evening sunshine. As for the dives themselves, they weren't the best ones I've ever done but the reasons for that were not directly associated with the dives. There was a bit of a plankton soup going on, which reduced the visibility, but it meant there were basking sharks lurking around the Eddystone. One dive got a bit truncated due to getting stuck in a strong current, a result of the springy springs, and there were two others where I was supposedly leading but I'd never dived the sites before which made it a bit tricky to do properly. Also I've been having a problem for a while with headaches when I dive. There are long lists of things that can cause headaches when diving, and a common culprit is breathing. Skip breathing, trying to hold your breath to reduce air consumption, can be a problem, and so can breathing too much, for example when going to deeper depths or leading a dive when you're not used to it and therefore nervous, but also thinking about your breathing too much can cause headaches because it overrides your automatic carbon dioxide regulation mechanisms. Pffft. So I was trying not to breathe either too much or too little while not thinking about my breathing too much, and coming up with varying degrees of headache from the mildly irritating to the incapacitating. Now, another of the things on the list of things that can cause headaches is your mask being too tight. The strap clips on my mask are perfectly fine in that they stop the strap pulling out when it's on my head, but when I had a look at it just before the last dive, I think they don't stop it wandering around when it's not under tension, so it had spontaneously tightened itself. I'm not declaring the problem definitively solved yet, but I loosened off the mask before the last dive and came up headacheless, so perhaps all that arsing around with breathing was unnecessary.
And now I'm back here and have spent the entire evening watching telly, reading the internet and writing this post, with a small amount of rinsing things out and putting them on the balcony to dry. Nice.