MONTY: Christmas thoughts

Christmas is fast approaching, which of course means a festival of gluttony, television, and rarely-seen relatives. I’m sure there are families out there on Christmas Day who eat a well-balanced dinner, unwrap beautiful presents in front of crackling log fires, then go on long walks together and kick happily through piles of winter leaves while laughing at little Timmy on his trike, but I’m damned if I know any of them.

Christmas round our place tends to consist of eating to the point of internal injury, then staring glassily at the TV with the top button of your trousers undone, while Granny generates more wind than a barrelling low-pressure system over Fastnet. The most demanding thing during the course of the day – both physically and mentally – is the acting skill required to show pleasure when your presents are revealed. When I unwrapped the Caring For Your Body After 40 book from my sister last year, the festival of gurning I produced to show my gratitude would have pushed Meryl Streep to breaking point.

It’s often struck me that the diving fraternity is precisely like the big, rowdy clan that descends on my house at Christmas. We divers moan and bicker, just like a huge, dysfunctional family. But we also look out for each other, and – generally – have a pretty good time in each other’s company.

It was with Christmas in mind that a gentleman approached me recently to buy the book of Great Ocean Adventures. This searing romp is a bodice-ripper of a read, with heaving bosoms, regular swooning episodes, tantrums, and vomiting – and that was just the film crew. It’s all printed on high-quality foolscap, with images by Scubazoo that are soft, strong, and surprisingly absorbent.

He said that he would like it for a mate for Christmas, and asked me to write something in the front cover. I was just about to pen some brittle piece of wit and wisdom (such as ‘All the best’, ‘Safe diving’, or ‘Cheers’ – positively Oscar Wildean in it’s understated genius, I’m sure you agree), when the chap mentioned that it was for a Christmas package for his mate serving in Afghanistan. And do you know what? I couldn’t think of a single thing to write.

The reason – and I’m afraid I can’t think of any other way to put this – is that I’m in awe of what the young men and women of our armed forces are doing out there. Think what you may about the politics, the bottom line is that every minute of every hour of every day there are British teenagers, and dads, and mums, and brothers, and sisters, and sons, and daughters, putting everything they have – in the most literal sense – on the line. This may not seem real to us back here in our wireless, Bluetooth-ed, cosseted life, where our biggest problem is the coming recession and what we can afford for Christmas. But a few hours’ flight away it is very real indeed.

The thing that really struck me was that this guy is a diver. He’d like nothing more than to be at home, pottering down to his local club of an evening, rolling in off the RIB into frigid winter water, or perhaps having a beer or two in front of a fire in the pub at the end of the day. But he can’t, not for a little while anyway.

In the end, I wrote something bloody awful about keeping chins up, all the while feeling a bit shallow and inadequate. What I did quietly promise myself was that, come Christmas Day, I would raise a glass for all those members of the diving family who are a long way from home and in harm’s way, wishing them a speedy and safe return to the fold and the singular joys of British diving. Have a great Christmas one and all.