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I am much loving these Bank Holiday weekends. I’m not sure I have ever really noticed them before but 3 days away from the grindstone perhaps seems more important to me than it used to. I had to go into work this morning to work on a skeleton argument for a case in Hong Kong with my Leader. Then I rushed down to Worthing for my niece’s first birthday party.

She is proof positive (as if it were needed) that there is a “Pizza Gene” in my family

What I enjoy about photgraphing kids is that their thoughts are writ large on their faces. Here she is plainly thinking “you bastard – you’re going to produce this at my 21st birthday party aren’t you?”. She is a very perceptive one year old.

Little E is also my goddaughter, Having almost reached 40 without kids you collect instead a large number of goddchildren. P and I have 9 between us. It began to become something of a joke. Friends would invite us out to dinner because they had something “important” to ask us and we’d start to feel like Bertie Wooster faced with a wedding proposal. Somehow, now the birthdays are all safely in the diary and a routine of gift-buying established, I am now most worried we won’t make double figures.

the Charnas … who is in fine form today.

As my insanely busy work week drags on I am reduced to reposting a story from my old blog. New entry later today when I’ve got some sleep!

Scuba adventure
I have, as regular readers will know, something of a tender set of innards. A few years ago P and I went on an exotic holiday. The hotel we were staying in had a sunny beach and a well stocked fridge. P caught me taking a bottle of water. She pointed out that it would be VERY EXPENSIVE and that there was a tap in the bathroom. I slunk off and had a glass of lovely tap water. An hour or so later I began to develop stomach cramps and the inevitable holiday trots. P was an angel pointing out that I should avoid dehydration and kept a steady supply of tap water coming.

After a week of never daring to move more than 3 yards from the loo I scrambled to the doctor. “Hmm” he said “not sure what’s wrong with you – but avoid the tapwater as we’re having a drought and its full of bacteria”. I went back to the room, opened the fridge and downed a bottle of Evian.

The next day I felt well enough to try my first openwater scuba dive. 15 metres down and 20 minutes into the dive I felt a familiar stirring. Oh lordy! Now what? I figured that as I had not eaten in 6 days and we were in the sea there was a decent chance no-one was going to notice. I swam away a little and tried to look nonchalant. 2 minutes later I noticed that I was attracting a lot of attention from my fellow divers. Some were taking photographs. What, I wondered, could they be pointing at? When I looked behind me I found I had attracted a huge shoal of fish stretching back from my rear like a piscine tail, all apparently feeding dementedly. I believe I’m still known in those parts as the Deep Sea Arse Monster.