"I suppose you could call many of my modern day fascinations my childhood fantasies realised. One textbook example of that without a doubt had to be my first proper encounter with the underwater world and Scuba diving.
Like many things, I was first exposed to scuba diving on television. You’d always see some kind of holiday show or even a game show where the people would strap on the big, and admittedly fascinating gear and mouthpieces, and dip their heads beneath the water, and stay down there for what looked like hours at a time.
My parents were keen to drill into me early in life that most stuff I’d see on TV ‘wasn’t real’, so much like everything else I’d seen, I’d assumed that this diving stuff must have been another one of those TV trickery moments. Amazing to see, but sadly just a make-believe activity.
Maybe a year or so later when I was 5, we were all taken to a big aquarium on a family outing. I’d been to aquariums before, but this was the biggest one I’d ever been to. We eventually came to the building’s centrepiece – An enormous tank that reached high up, storeys to the ceiling, and seemed to continue down even further below our feet. My little mind was mesmerised as I pressed my paws to the glass and the blue glow from the tank shone onto my face, watching the diverse living show of colour swimming around before me.
What came next changed that trip. From high above, something dropped into the water, and started to come down. Was it a new fish, maybe a baby whale? No. Eventually, the silhouette of a man came down, and my eyes widened. Right in front of me, was my own fairytale coming true. The man was wearing a lot of bulky equipment, but it was everything I had seen on the TV. Despite the enormous weight of everything he must have been wearing, he simply floated there, face to face with me suspended in neutral buoyancy as he waved to me and then the other onlookers before continuing down to attend his duties.
I watched him, transfixed for a good twenty minutes before I was eventually dragged away to go elsewhere in the aquarium, but now I knew – I could be the other side of that glass one day. I could be part of that world."
