The Etiquette of Buses

Three weeks ago I put my car in for it's MOT. Three weeks later, and I still haven't had it back. It failed with flying colours, needing almost everything major replacing, and being such an uncommon model of Corsa (a 1.8, apparently) finding second-hand replacement parts is proving rather difficult. And so for the last month I've been forced to find other means of getting to work. I work about 7 miles from my rented flat in Bournemouth Town Centre. I tried cycling for a week or two, but given that this has been the wettest January since records began, that was soon out of the question. I was left with just one choice. I had to get the bus. Buses are very strange things, I find. They have a certain 'aura' about them which is different to other forms of transport, like trains and cars. Life seems a lot slower on a bus, and there are certain sorts of 'bus people'; people who, for some reason or another, you will only ever encounter in life whilst on a bus. Bus People Take, for example, the bloke with his music up too loud. He rides the bus everyday ( and occasionally the trains at weekends, when he's feeling fancy). It seems that the whole 'bus' experience is just too abominable to withstand, with it's whooshes and echoey rain splatters on the roof, and so he has to resort to letting the rest of the bus know just how much he is disliking being there by playing Skrillex loud enough for the bus driver to be tapping his fingers along. Then there are the day shoppers. They wear and carry everything they could possibly need whilst out 'running errands', and so you'll normally find them wearing a parka jacket, bobbly hat, and pulling some sort of tartan shopping trolley. They're harmless, but occasionally smell of stale bread and/or cat wee. And then we have the bus drivers themselves. I've personally only encountered three types in my life. The overly-happy, slightly-rounded male bus driver, who always bids you a good day even when he can clearly see you're not having a good day. The grumpy, middle-aged man who seems to have it in for school children ("I've told you three bleeding times, only ring the bell if you're actually getting off!"). And then there's the butch lesbian who looks like Miss Trunchbull from Matilda. She just hates everyone. The Journey I was on a bus home from work the other night. It's been horrendous weather the last few days, with gale force winds and that annoying spitty-rain that isn't really rain but still makes your eyes squint. I got on the bus, paid my fare to Mr Overly Happy Bus Driver, and found the first empty row of seats I could. Being rush hour, the bus was particularly busy, so I think I got the last one. I put by bag on my lap, because I didn't want to be that arse who reserved the seat next to them for their bags and forced other people to stand (not today, anyway). I therefore wasn't particularly bothered when, at the next stop, a woman quickly shuffled through the bus and claimed the last empty seat next to me. I soon noticed that she appeared to be on the phone, too. The bus moved on, gently making it's occupants lurch forwards and back with every turn, and I noticed she wasn't talking in English. In fact, she wasn't really talking at all; more a constant mumble of words which sounded quite similar to a character from the Sims, except, unfortunately for me, there was no volume button. She seemed completely unperturbed by the range of 'whirs' and 'oomphs' coming from the engine of the bus as it struggled up and down the hills of Bournemouth. I personally would have found it a bit too hard to hear and would have asked whoever it was on the other end to call me back when I was at home, but she, oh lady in the padded Adidas coat, seemed to be an expert in public transport conversing and carried on as if she was sat in a field on a lovely Summer's day, and the only thing to break the silence around her was the quiet pitter-patter of squirrels scurrying up a nearby tree. I was trying to read the last of my book on my Kindle, which I haven't been able to put down ("The Hundred-Year-Old-Man Who Climbed Out of The Window And Disappeared"), and, after several weeks of reading, was finally getting to the all important part of why he climbed out of the window in the first place, when all I could hear in my ear was a murmuring of words like a badly-tuned human Morse Code machine. It was at that point I also noticed her strange arm movements. She was, at regular intervals, raising and lowering her right arm so that her hand was obscuring her mouth. Perhaps she was yawning? No, that's too long to be a yawn, I thought to myself, and the pitch of her voice isn't changing like it does mid-yawn, making you sound like you've momentarily lost your all hearing and are asking for directions to the local bank. No, she was just sitting there, with her hand over her mouth, but talking just as loud as before. And then she'd move her hand down again. And then she'd move it up. It was most peculiar, and I couldn't fathom why she was doing it, but the frequent elbow juts in my ribs made it very hard for me to get past the sentence 'Alan Karlson in fact climbed out of his window because...' Ths bus journey from Poole bus station to Bournemouth town square takes approximately 30 minutes on a good day, and there are various places along the way where a lot of people alight. It is general bus etiquette, I thought, that when enough people have vacated the bus for there to be plenty of other seats free, the person who has sat next to someone else generally relieves that someone else of their presence, and moves to a free seat on the other side of the bus. I generally thought that this is what everyone does. Apparently, this is not what everyone does. We were about half way through the journey when, after finally learning why Alan Karlson was out of the window, I noticed the bus was a lot emptier than before. Head still down, I quickly glanced around and my thoughts were confirmed. Almost half the people had left. 'Good,' I thought, cosying into my seat, 'the mumbling lady will finally move'. In fact, she did not move. She continued to talk, perhaps even quicker and high pitched than before. I tried the old English method of gently 'heh-heming', which didn't work. I knew I'd have to be a bit more obvious than that. I sat up straight, looked around me, twisting my shoulders as I did so, so that I was staring around the bus, making sure I held my gaze for slightly longer than any normal person would. The mumbling woman noticed this, and then also looked up, joined me in twisting her shoulders and looking round the bus to see what I was looking at. She only saw empty seats, and so had no idea why I was turning around, and so got back on with her conversation. 'Strange English Lady,' she must have thought to herself. This happened no less than four times. It was only when we pulled into the bus station at Bournemouth Town Square and I had stood up in my seat, that she finally acknowledged it was probably time for her to move. We were, in fact, the only two people left on the entire double-decker bus, and as she got off, I noticed she brushed her coat down, as if she was annoyed my germs were still on her. Since then, I have to admit I've always chosen to sit on the single seats near the front. The only problem I have to face then is the occasional 'bum-in-face' incident when the bus is busy. Maybe bus journeys just aren't meant for me. Other Bus 'Things' In between my bad experiences on buses, there are also several other things which have struck me as being particular bus-related things. Here are my top 5: On buses, you can stare at people's hair for long lengths of time without feeling awkward. You haven't been able to do this since assemblies at school. How DO they get their hair so shiny? Everyone on the bus is in agreement that they all, collectively, hate school children. No matter how new a bus is, there is always one chair that squeaks. If it's the chair you're sat in, you genuinely want to keep apologising to the rest of the bus for your misbehaving and somewhat nervous seat. Someone always has a Nokia phone from 2001 with the keypad tones left on. BEEP BOOP BOOP BEEP. Whenever someone gets on the bus and asks in their most high-pitched voice for a 'child' single, you always stare at them and judge if you think they're young enough ("Hey wait a minute - you're not young, you're just really fucking short! That's not fair!") So, in essence, I really, really hope I get my car back soon. I think I've had my fair share of bus-ness for a while now.

I was brought up by my parents to be very much in touch with nature. We lived about a two minute walk from East Beach in Shoeburyness, Essex, and on brisk, sunny mornings, we'd put on our thick coats and trainers and stroll to the beach. In all honesty, it's not the nicest beach in the world, if it's a 'beach' you're actually looking for. The patches of sand are so few and far between that in Summer it is completely necessary to wear something on your feet at all times; unless you like walking as if the ground is laced with bear traps, that is. This was handy for us growing up, as it happened to be at the time when jelly shoes were the height of fashion. A shoe so diverse it could be worn on hot days, on cold days with socks, on sand, in the water, and the variety of colours and glitter meant they could also be dressed up for nicer, more fancy occasions - such as school discos. They were the more popular forefathers, I do believe, of Crocs. But East Beach isn't a beach you go to for the sand. It has an air of history about it. A 1km long defence boom built in 1944 to prevent enemy submarines entering the Thames still lies in between the public beach and the MOD site next to it, once armed with anti-aircraft guns & searchlights. All that stands today of the 1km stretch are the concrete support pillars and iron beams, which my brother and I always used to see as a competition of 'who could walk the furthest on without falling off'. It wasn't very easy; neither of us ever got very far, given that the majority of iron between the pillars was rusted and falling away, but that never stopped us, or every other child approaching the beach, trying. It was like a pre-made adventure playground on the beach - one that would never, in a million years, pass a health and safety inspection. On the beach itself there are lines of shells and pebbles, organised neatly by the waves in which lies a wealth of small objects. Before we left the house in the morning, Mum would give each of us a small plastic sandwich bag and we'd keep it safely in our pockets. When we got down to the beach, we'd walk onto one of the lines of stones and shells and begin 'Mudlarking'. Mudlarking is the term for beachcombing, or in my case, looking for pretty things in the sand. In the early 20th century, a Mudlark was an official and recognised occupation, but now it's much more regarded as a hobby for keen beach-amblers, or people who have seen one too many episodes of the Antiques Roadshow and fancy themselves a bit of a treasure hunter. Shoeburyness lies at the mouth of the river Thames where it meets the North Sea. From the shore of East Beach, Kent is visible across the water, some 5 miles away, but if it's a particular foggy day all you can see is the water (and we prefer it that way - all the factories on the shoreline look terribly ugly from our side of the river and are a bit of an eyesore. Sorry, Kent, but couldn't you have put your garden there instead?) The mud on the riverbed of the Thames is made up of anaerobic mud, meaning it can perfectly preserve whatever it absorbs for hundreds of years. Back in Victorian England, the Thames was more seen as a giant rubbish tip than a river; things which you and I might take to the charity shop nowadays, for instance, the Victiorians would simply tip over the edge into the murky waters below. As the Thames is a tidal river, twice a day new hoards of these treasures are unearthed and strewn across the shoreline from London to Essex, ready to be discovered by anyone wanting to see a slice of the history of London. This also means that twice a day, it's possible to walk out onto the mud flaps at Shoeburyness for over a mile and look back at the Essex coastline. It's an eerie sensation, walking into a muddy abyss with no sign of civilisation in sight. You feel lost in a strange world full of crabs, seaweed and there's a pungent smell of- Actually, it's probably better not to think what it smells of. But it is quite a strange, almost soothing experience, and the mud takes some getting used to. It's very, well... slimy. It oozes out between your toes and farts when you try and lift your feet out of it, and god forbid if you fall over in it; I don't care what Persil says, those stains will never come out. Every Summer when we were young, my cousins, brother and sister and I used to trek out into the mud in our swimming costumes while our parents sat on the beach and we'd try and see how far we could get. Occasionally we'd come across a patch of mud - quite similar to quick sand - where all you had to do was wiggle your hips and you'd instantly sink up to your waist in mud. My cousin Catherine once wiggled all-too-ferociously and ended up so deep (boob level) my Uncle Keith had to come out and help fish her out because we were all to scared of getting stuck too. If you got stuck up to your thighs and managed to get yourself out on your own, it was almost like you possessed an unspoken bragging right in the group for the rest of the day. In truth, I haven't been down to East Beach in quite a while, and I rather miss it. Compared with the glory that is Bournemouth beach, it does look a bit run-down, but there's just something about it that will always capture me. Many a day I spent walking along the sand, upset with my parents for not buying me Westlife tickets for my 11th birthday, or annoyed at my sister for borrowing my Hello Kitty jumper without asking. Those were tough times, but East Beach saw me through it. I'd distract myself by sifting through the sand and seeing what goodies I could find. The most common things anyone would encounter (other than shells and pebbles) would be pottery and glass; little white fragments of old porcelain with blue detailing painted on, and lumps of blue, green and pink glass, smoothed by years of tumbling in the water. For years we'd collect bits and bobs we'd find and take them home. They lived in various places around our house, such as on top of the microwave in the 'bits and bobs' bowl (along with hairclips, safety pins, missing buttons and various screws which have just 'appeared' over the years, their previous location still yet to be determined, but were too scared to throw away just in case they're one day needed."You never know!"). The best finds go into a Vintage printing drawer my parents have hung up on the wall in the hallway to store all their favourite nik-naks (see below), and where my mum keeps her best earrings. She's also turned many of the shells she found along the beach into earrings, too, and used to sell them at the Christmas Bazaar at our Primary School, St Georges. Some of our best findings, including a Victorian doll's head, a fossilised sea urchin and ammonite, an old coin (circa 1910) and a shark tooth. Better still, my parents have recently 'done up' their garden (they're trying to do up a lot of the house at the moment, as you might have gathered - it's only taken them 25 years). Given the amount of times we'd been collecting down the beach, the pile of glass, porcelain and old clay smoking pipes my mum found herself in possession of was getting somewhat ridiculous, one of her favourite phrases being 'we really ought to do something with all of this, you know'. And what do you know, she finally did. On my last visit from Bournemouth back to Essex, I explored the newly paved garden, and saw she'd made several different mosaics into the floor in between the slabs they'd bought from Homebase. It was delightful, looking down and knowing that everything I could see was once part of someone's life over a hundred years ago, from a smoking pipe to a possible flower vase. And now it'll be a part of my parents lives, for many more years to come. My mum's quite the artist, isn't she? So next time you go to London and walk alongside the Thames, just have a think how much 'stuff' there could be lying hidden at the bottom. Who knows, you could throw a coke can into the water tomorrow (this is merely hypothetical; I'm not actually condoning it), and it could end up as part of a water feature in someone's garden in 150 years time.

A very homely Christmas

I think the build-up to Christmas is my favourite part of the all the festivities. It gets longer each year, and for one reason or another, it just makes people happy. German Christmas markets pop up everywhere, hot mulled wine is served in little red boots, there's the warm smell of roasted chestnuts, and Christmas is still a week or two away so the panic of 'Oh shitbollocks, I've forgotten to buy a present for Auntie Julie and I have no idea what she likes, will a soap set do?' hasn't quite set in. Coming home for Christmas is, and always will be, one of the warmest feelings in the world. I can't quite describe what I mean, other than when I walked into the lounge in my parents' house on Christmas Eve after a 3 and a half hour drive from Bournemouth in the pouring rain, there was a part of my insides that felt like a little switch had been flicked on, and a mini hot water bottle was squidged in between my lungs and my intestines put their feet up in front of a log fire. Since I was last home, my parents have been 'doing up the place'. On my last visit in early November, the walls of the lounge were strewn with various different wallpaper samples from B&Q, and my mum asked me to stare at each one individually with my hands cupped around it to try and imagine the whole wall in that paper. Naturally, they chose the wallpaper I advised against, but there I was, standing in the lounge, with the new wall staring back at me. And I have to admit, not listening to me was (for once) the right decision. It looked brilliant. And even though the wallpaper was different, there was a new carpet, and several of the pictures on the wall had been switched around, it was still home. And I was delighted to see that the tree was just as I'd remembered. Now, my parents' Christmas tree is what a lot of people would call 'tacky', in that anything and everything is thrown onto the branches. The tree itself is artificial, as old as me (25 years), and looks as if some of the rows of branches just didn't want to be part of the Christmas Tree anymore, and left in search of a better life, perhaps as those fancy dead twigs people have in vases in their hallways next to the potpourri. In actual fact, our previous cat Cleo made her best efforts every year to climb into the tree and sit on the branches, and her beady yellow eyes would glimmer through the tinsel. This was fine when she was a kitten, but as she grew older, and somewhat bigger, the branches soon began to bend under her weight, until she had to sprawl all four legs across as many branches and Christmas lights as she could just to stop herself falling through. Since then, I'm afraid the tree has never quite looked the same again. I suggested to my parents that perhaps it was time for a new tree, you know, one that didn't look like a broom was half way through getting changed into a Christmas Tree outfit after a shower. But my mum is very sentimental and hates wasting things, and assured me 'it's got another few years in it yet!' And even though the tree does look slightly tacky, it looks homely. It wouldn't be the same without the decorations we made as children out of plasticine (including a rather fetching one of Pingu made by yours truly), a set of musical bells that play 'O Come All Ye Faithful' one bell at a time (except one bell doesn't work, and my mum can't work out for the life of her which one it is, and so hums in the gaps), knitted angels, crocheted snowflakes and old material baubles with threads loose handed down from my nan. I don't get all these trees that are colour co-ordinated, and precisely engineered to have the same tinsel-to-bauble ratio. My friend at work was bragging one day about his Christmas Tree and how orderly it looked. He even showed me a picture to demonstrate how everything was in perfect symmetrical lines, everything was the same colour, and no one was allowed to decorate the tree but him, and when he started telling me about how much he dislikes tinsel, well. I very much had to leave the conversation. Christmas Day at our house always begins with the annual 'photo in front of the Christmas Tree'. It's normally taken in the morning, once everyone has had breakfast (usually something fancy, like a bagel), had a shower, and wearing something festive. My dad sets his SLR camera up one end of the lounge on a tripod, puts on the auto timer, and runs like a Chinese man across hot coals to quickly kneel down next to us and smile before the picture is taken. It is lovely looking back year after year at the different Christmas pictures and seeing how we've all changed. But two things to bear in mind are 1) Once a photo is taken on my dad's camera, it disappears into the deep chasm of the memory card, and no human but my dad will ever see it for years to come, and 2) he takes about 15 photos, with and without flash, so that by the time the lighting is correct our smiles have drooped, someone is blinking, and the beeper is going on the oven for the turkey to be taken out. The two photos I took on my own camera, as I wanted to see them before 2019 The opening of presents is just as important as the taking of the Christmas picture. We move a chair next to the pile of presents and it is either my mum or dad's duty to dish them out. They're normally done one at a time, so everyone has long enough to marvel at their gift, say the relevant thank-yous, and play the game of 'who can get their wrapping paper into the rubbish bag in the middle of the room' before the next wave of presents are given out. Mum and Dad always seem to bicker over who gets to be the hander-outer of presents, as if doing so is some kind of recognition of 'parent of the year' award. Just for the record, my mum handed them out this year. It was a particularly special Christmas this year, because it was the first time that a lot of us were actually spending Christmas Day together. In previous years, my sister Louise spent the day with her husband's family, and my brother went to his fiancée's family's house, and I usually worked in a restaurant. But this Christmas was the first one in about 5 years where I was to be at my parents' house, for the whole day, and both my brother and sister would be there too. With me living almost 200 miles away, and my brother and sister having equally busy lives, we rarely get to see each other all at the same time. On Christmas morning I could see my mum's eyes sparkle as she knew that today, for the first day in a very long time, all her children who flew the nest many years ago would all be back together again, and I wish I could have encapsulated the happiness in that moment in a picture. Once the presents were opened and the picture was taken, I soon realised my mum apparently had invited a person who, it would seem, was very important. She referred to this person when cooking, when talking about the seating arrangements, how much they'd like to eat and drink, how long they'd like to stay for, what they'd like to watch on TV, and so on. As far as an individual goes, they seem rather selfish and a bit too snobby to be honest. For all intents and purposes, she named them 'people'. "We want to make sure everything is ready for when people arrive" "Well, people might not want to eat much." "What do people want to drink? Go find out, Jennifer!" "Have people had enough to eat? There is more in the kitchen, let me go get it" "People can have whatever they like for dessert" I half expected either a Royal King to stroll in and sit at the head of the table, or a hoard of 50 people to come clambering through the door. The best part was that as all 4 of us, the only ones who would be present for dinner, were in the kitchen helping my mum dish up everything into the 'good china' ( the crockery which lives in a glass cabinet and only gets used at Christmas) she still insisted on saying 'people', as if we were either invisible or going to give birth that instant to more people. "Mum, we are the people" I quickly reminded her. "What? Oh yes, yes, but you know what I mean..." I left her to it and said no more as we walked into the neatly laid dining table in the conservatory, as she wondered 'one bag of brussel sprouts might not be enough, you know! What if people like brussels?' (One bag was more than enough; apparently people were too full after all.) This was also my first Christmas in many years not as a vegetarian. It has only been about 3 months since I've started eating meat again, and so there are still many 'new things' to have; foods I haven't had in so long I've forgotten how quite exactly how they tasted. And Christmas dinner was one of them. I'd learnt to love Quorn over the years, and in the past my Quorn Roast, which resembles the body of a small sausage dog who's died of dehydration, was good enough to keep me satisfied during Christmas dinner. A Quorn Roast. This year, however, turkey was back on the menu. To celebrate, my mum decided to treat us all and cook not only turkey, but gammon and duck, too. All separately of course; not one of those vile concoctions you can buy from frozen supermarkets where you buy all the birds stuffed together in one like some giant winged Russian doll. It was only after we'd all finished our second helpings that my dad, oblivious as always, asked how my vegetarian meal was, and I reminded him that I'd asked him to pass me the turkey and he'd watched me put some onto my plate, to which his reply was: 'Oh. Welcome back, then.' After dessert, and once everyone had loosened their belts at least 2 notches, mum and dad came sniggering back to the dining table holding a stack of papers and some pencils. Before Christmas, they'd dropped off my nan at my aunt and uncle's house in Basingstoke so she could spend Christmas with them, and while they were there, my aunt and uncle had concocted a Christmas quiz. This was the very same quiz that mum and dad were now handing out. I knew the odd fact here and there about Christmas, the names of all the reindeer, the origins of Kris Kringle, what colour Father Christmas' coat used to be etc, and so was feeling semi confident, until my mum said 'Oh, Jennifer. You probably won't know very many. Sorry.' I wasn't sure what she meant, until I looked down and saw we had to write down all the names of the Christmas number 1's along with the artists for the years stated. We were given the first letter of each word, but seeing as the majority on the sheet were before I was born in 1988, I felt like I was, to put it politely, a bit buggered. From personal experience, Christmas songs are the very few songs where you have no idea who sings it. Other than the very famous ones like Maria Carey and Slade, very few people (including me) actually know the names of any of the songs or the artists; they're just played on repeat on the radio and in shops and you're more familiar with the tune than you are of the name. To name them is more like going 'oh, it's the one where a waitress is moaning', or 'something about Mary's child? Mary's boy child?' and 'Driving Home for Christmas by that guy who sounds like Morgan Freeman with a sore throat'. There was some cheating involved, whereby my brother started peering over his fiancée's sheet and asking to swap answers in exchange for better cracker prizes, and then my mum was giving very obvious clues such as 'It rhymes with Miff Wichard' to anyone who was stuck. As I could have predicted, my sister won by a mile, but I got a lot more answers than I thought, especially ones such as 'Bob the Builder - Can we Fix It?' (Christmas Number 1 in 2000). All in all, it was possibly the best Christmas I'd ever had. Because, for the first time ever, I didn't actually care about presents or food, I was just happy to be back with my family. And after all, that's what Christmas is really about, isnt it? In fact, thinking back, I did encapsulate my mum's happiness in a photo on Christmas Day. I made her take her very first selfie. I also decided to recreate this photo that my mum had stuck on the back of the door in the downstairs loo, along with many other highly embarrassing Christmas photos from the 1990s. My mum even had to go into the loft to find my doll Michelle and repair her face with plasters just so we could retake this photo, as for some reason, when I was 5 I liked to play the game of 'throw Michelle as high as I can in the air' over a concrete floor, and her face continued to smash and fall off, and then I'd do it all again. And don't worry, I know what you're thinking; no I haven't tried this with my hamster Pippin. Me: 1993 vs 2013. Wearing a peplum top before it was even in fashion. I hope everyone has as lovely a Christmas as I did. Here's to many more in the future.

Taking the plunge

When I was age 10, I wanted to learn how to swim. Not just doggy paddle, I wanted to be able to swim quickly and hold my breath underwater, like a mermaid. My friend Sarah and I were signed up to swimming lessons by our parents at the big pool near us called Warrior Square. To a 10 year old, it was enormous. The main pool looked miles long, and had a long, tiered gallery at the side where our mums could watch us swim and talk about The Bill and Casualty. We didn't have any swimming badges, so we weren't allowed lessons in the big pool just yet. Instead, we had to join the 6 and 7 year old's in the kiddy pool, which had mosaics of starfish and whales on the walls, and was so shallow the water only came up to our thighs. But we didn't mind. The water was hotter in there. A girl in our class at School, Nicola Gray, had a brother who was taking lessons in the big pool. He was asked by the teacher to demonstrate the breast stroke for us all. I remember looking at him in awe as he gracefully swam up and down the length of the pool, his long legs expanding like frogs, his head hovering at the same height the whole way. How did he keep it so still when his body was bobbing up and down? He had a smug look on his face as he swam, a sense of 'swimming superiority'. Well, I would too if I could swim as well as that. It wasn't long before Sarah and I were told we were good enough to leave and have lessons in the big pool. The lessons were on the far right hand side, across the width of the pool. There were three different lanes for lessons - the further left the lane, the better the swimmer you were and the higher badges you could go for. We were introduced to our new teacher, an elderly woman called Pam who had short, white hair and wore a baggy Adidas tracksuit, and got into the water. A few weeks later, and after getting our 200m swimming badge, a new boy wearing blue Speedos joined our lane. His name was Reese, and he had a slimy look about him. I didn't like swimming after him, because I had it in my head that he had really smelly feet, and I thought that if I was behind him, he'd make all the water smelly and I'd be swimming face first into it and all his smelly water would go into my mouth . I'd make an excuse to my teacher, like 'just re adjusting my goggles, Miss!', so that someone else would go in front of me. He wasn't very good at swimming either, and so when Sarah and I moved up to the next lane, I was glad to see he stayed put. Someone else could have his smelly water. There was a diving pool at Warrior Square too, and as we swam up and down in our lessons, we could see other children having lessons. They'd tip toe to the edge of the springboard, wobble and flap their arms like the teacher showed them, and fall in the water. Occasionally you'd see the teacher demonstrate and do a dive with a spin from the board, and you could tell it was a good dive because hardly any splash would come off the water. We asked our mums if we could do diving lessons too, and they said yes. My swimming costume was getting very stretched and see through and had bobbly bits all over it, so my mum took me to JD sports to get a new one ready for my new lessons. I wanted a really bright, colourful one. I found a Speedo one, which was navy blue at the bottom and faded into a sunset orange and yellow at the top. I loved it. I felt like a professional athlete wearing it, with it's racer back and sports logo. When I tried it on at the shop, it was perfect. When I got home, I eagerly tried it on again, like any young girl does with new clothes. Except, I noticed there was a big hole in the back of it. It was part of the design, it was meant to have a big hole... but, well it worried me. When I pulled the swimming costume on and it was halfway up, my bum poked out the big hole in the back, and my sister and mum roared in fits of laughter at me. I laughed along with them, at first, but then I started to worry. What if as I dived, a rush of water would pull my swimming costume down, and my bum would be on show for everyone in the pool to see?! I didn't like my swimming costume anymore. For my first few diving lessons, my teacher asked why I was pulling my legs up high and wrapping my arms around myself as soon as I hit the water. Even at age twelve, I felt far too embarrassed to say 'because I don't want everyone to see my big bum'. And so without telling her why, I asked my mum to buy me a new swimming costume for Christmas. I got a dark blue one, which had normal straps, and more importantly, no gaping holes. The first thing we learnt was a standing jump. You had to stand 6 feet away from the edge of the springboard, take 3 slow strides, jump on the spot on the end pushing your arms down, and then jump again into the water with your arms high above your head. For a simple jump, there seemed to be a lot of unnecessary arm flapping and stepping going on, but we spent two whole lessons learning how to perfect it. "How was your diving lesson tonight Jennifer?" my mum would ask in the car on the drive home. "Oh yeah, it was good thanks. We learnt how to jump." I could tell she didn't think she was getting her money's worth. But soon we learnt how to do other things. There was the pike; a jump where you bring your straightened legs gracefully infront of you, touch your toes, and then straighten your body as you enter the water. Now, I was never the most flexible child, so I never actually managed to touch my toes, or even keep my legs straight for the matter, so my pike tended to look more like a pufferfish. Then there were three types of dive; one, where you place your hands together, bend at the hips, and simply fall into the water (I was good at this one), a normal standing dive, whereby you had to travel as little distance as possible, jumping high in the air before turning and aiming your body at the water (slightly harder to get the hang of - I always ended up at the wrong end of the pool with water up my nose), and a 'tuck-dive', where, in the middle of a normal standing dive, you'd tuck your legs like a canon ball, quick un-tuck them and then finish off the dive (the hardest of the three, mostly because I'd often forget I was doing a dive, and just do a cannon into the water and splash my teacher and drench her tracksuit bottoms. I always stood the ground that she worked in a pool, she knew she was going to get wet. It was hardly my fault.) One of the hardest things to get to grips with was a back dive. You had to stand on the edge of the diving pool, with your heels over the edge, hands straight up in air, and bend your back the wrong way so that you landed, hands first, into the water. It was mind boggling. Just like when I was learning how to high-jump at school, and I couldn't for the life of me understand how you could run straight at the high jump bar, but end up jumping backwards over it. At first, there were a lot of falling backwards into the water, from everyone. It seemed no one else quite understood how we were meant to do it either. In the end, our teacher used to stand next to us with her arm like a rigid horizontal pole on our backs, and make us jump over it. All the other children before me managed it fine, and jumped over her arm into a perfect back dive. Trust me to be the one that forgets to jump over it, but instead jumps into it, and drags poor Pam and her Adidas tracksuit into the water with me. Although she gave me quite evil stares for the next five minutes, it actually worked out well in our favour, because now she was drenched, she saw no reason why she couldn't perfectly demonstrate the back dive for us so we could see what a real one looked like (it's very hard doing a dive you've never seen before), and then even a few other fancy ones later. Three lessons later, and we'd perfected the back dive from the side of the pool that we could do it from the springboard. This was a much stranger sensation, as it takes a few more seconds to hit the water, everything was upside down, and you had a constant fear you were going to do a loop-de-loop and accidentally knock out your front teeth on the board. Now, I have to tell you that learning to do a dive with a spin in the middle isn't half as glamorous as it looks on television. You have to jump upright into the air, tuck in your legs quickly to make you spin round, and then as soon as my teacher yells 'NOW', un-stretch your legs into a dive pose and enter the water. The very first time I tried, I stretched out just a little bit too late, and landed hard on the waters surface on the back of my neck. Necks are not meant to be landed on. I suffered a two day migraine after that. That was not a good day. Over the years, my diving lessons on the whole went very well. I could do everything my teacher had taught me, and do them all rather well if I'm totally honest. But unfortunately, I also discovered along the way that I had a horrible fear of heights. I hadn't really been aware of this fear before hand - I mean, I knew I didn't really like tall trees, but I'd never connected two and two together. After all, I wasn't jumping from the top of a tall tree. My teacher told me that in order to progress, I'd have to start doing proper dives from the higher boards. The ones where you have to climb steps. A lot of steps. In truth, I managed quite a few dives from the second board. It was about 3m high and was also a springboard, and our teacher got into the habit of making us do a dive from it at the end of each lesson. Walking to the end, each step made the board wobble to and fro and when the rails either side of me stopped, I'd shuffle to the end, never taking my feet off the board. I always chose the falling dive, because it was easier to simply fall into the water than do lots of jumping and risk catapulting myself onto the hard tiled surface by the side of the pool. I didn't fancy another headache. Once, I'm proud to say, I even jumped from the top board. I'd psyched myself up to do it all lesson; everyone else in my class had already done it, so there was no going back. A little boy in front of me called Michael walked to the edge and simply 'plopped' off the edge into the water - he made it look so easy. Well, there was no going back now. It was strange jumping from a board that was springy. I stood 6 feet away from the edge, took the three steps, did the flappy arms thing, and then finally took a step off the edge. It was a long fall, the hairs on my arms stood on end as the air rushed past my wet skin. All I remember was that my body skewered as I fell, so that I went in at a jaunty angle and I landed with a hard 'slap' onto the waters surface. I tumbled around in the water, plummeting to the bottom of the pool with a quick 'whoosh!' Well, it hurt a bit, but I'd done it. I'd actually done it! I was so proud of myself. I'd jumped off the top board even though I was scared of heights. But I think the thing I was most happy about at that moment was the fact that during that jump, I wasn't wearing the original swimming costume my mum had bought me.