MONTY: Has his career literally become a 'waste'

I am making a programme about poo. Yes, you did read that correctly. The show is all about the wondrous stuff that is dung (something beloved to us as divers, of course, as most sugar-white sandy beaches are parrotfish crap).

This has taken me to some wonderful places, including Nevada, South Africa, India and Borneo. I won’t dwell on the subject, but suffice to say that poo is jolly interesting stuff. I’ve become quite a fan, and can bore with the best of them at dinner parties now, causing considerable rattling of teacups and embarrassed silences among the luvvies who lunch here in Bristol.

Part of the show involved sifting through rhino middens in Hluwehluwe game park in South Africa. Rhinos like to relieve themselves in the same spot every day. Over the years this creates a monstrous pile of poo, which in itself becomes a mini ecosystem. I spent several happy hours sifting through this steaming universe, finding dung beetles the size of Tonka toys, and all manner of squirming, writhing, clicking life living happily in excrement.

These investigations were accompanied by frequent nervous glances over the shoulder, as the occasional rhino would turn up unexpectedly while I was mid-dig. Rhinos are notoriously bad-tempered, but I can now say with some authority that the rhino that’s looking forward to its morning poo but finds a marine biologist digging about in its toilet is very, very bad-tempered indeed. I spent a considerable amount of time hiding in my vehicle being glowered at by a creature that consists of several tonnes of sharp-point delivery system. A bit unnerving, to say the least.

While kneeling in the ordure, head down and bum up, it dawned on me that I could learn a great deal about how to approach my next dive from poo mining. As I squirreled about in the merde, all manner of exciting things stalked past in the distance – giraffes, buffalo, the odd elephant. I didn’t care for any of them, only having eyes for the drama being played out before me on a tiny scale. Wars were waged, romances sparked, meals consumed and territories claimed – all of it Lilliputian. It was magical, and I could have sat there for hours watching life unfold in the great aromatic universe of the dung heap.

We often make a big mistake as divers. How many times have you surfaced from a dive to ask your buddies how their dive was, and been greeted with ‘Oh, really dull, saw absolutely nothing’? Let me tell you that it’s impossible to have a quiet dive on an even half-decent reef – it’s all a question of scale. What your buddy means is that they didn’t see any of the following: mantas, sharks, dolphins, or big things killing little things. This discounts the several hundred other species bustling about their business, but completely ignored by the diver frantically scanning the middle distance overhead.

We drift over the seafloor like airships over a rainforest, occasionally touching down to glance at the complex world around us, to then levitate again to peer at the horizon. It’s all going on beneath us, nature red in tooth and claw, and we ignore it because the participants are not of a pre-ordained size that defines them as interesting.

There is a lovely story about Gerald Durrell doing his first snorkel on a coral reef. He walked out and stopped to put his fins on. Bending into waist-deep water, he glanced at the sea bed. Forty-five minutes later, he was still there, staring at the life that scuttled and seethed around his feet.

As I marvelled at the life in front of me in the dung heap, mining through layer upon layer of drama under the sweltering African sun, the sweat dripped from my every pore and streamed off my wrinkled nose. The moment seemed quite apt – we divers, if we’re wise, should learn to sweat the small stuff.