Well Beverley was buzzing this morning; she was told that she had passed her PADI exam with 94% and had made such good progress that she would qualify on the third day of what was to be a four day course. So now, she is considering whether to take the 2 day ‘advanced diving’ qualification later in the week! She is out, under the sea all day again today and I wanted to treat myself to a really nice lunch. After half an hour looking around the supermarket, I came out with a loaf of bread, a packet of fish fingers and a bottle of tomato sauce. Mmm!

There is a motorway on the way to the dive centre, but not as you know it! There are side roads leading onto it with red flashing lights. They don’t mean ‘stop’, they mean ‘beware’, because cars suddenly appear in front of you, as if by magic; just like on those video games. Not necessarily a car; this morning it was a ten ton road roller, which I swerved around, only to see a guy casually removing white lines from the centre of the road with a blow torch. He took a drag on his fag as I swerved around him. Expect absolutely anything and you’ve got the idea.
So having passed a ginger cat which was spread across the road, as if it had fallen from 30,000 feet (maybe it had!), I saw a strange looking bird slowly walking across the road, just ahead of me. It ignored my flashing lights so I started to break hard, whilst slowly realising that I was looking at a pigeon with a plastic bag on its head! I swerved onto the hard shoulder and as I leapt from the car I could hear Beverley’s voice echoing behind me, “don’t get run over darling”! I’m not sure if I remember the words because deep down, it may be the last time I would hear her voice, or because it was dam good advice when you are about to chase a pigeon across a motorway. Well the pigeon was terrified, it didn’t know I had come to save it, it lived in Cyprus, so its only thought was, ‘he’s going to eat me!’ As it took off, it’s head popped through a small hole in the bag and it disappeared over the nearby town. I was imagining what mockery it would receive from its friends as it landed in the town square!

Dinner booked tonight for 7pm so I am having an extremely lazy day before I pick up Beverley (who will be smelling like a fisherman’s dog) from the dive centre at 5pm. I’ll be in deep water for that!
I call her Beverley because my brother was married to a girl called Bev once. Paul could never really come to terms with having another Bev in the family, so Beverley it was, though most people call her Bev. As for me, Beverley calls me Daniel, because that is the name I prefer, though most people call me Dan. I was named Daniel because my Father went by that pseudonym during the war. With a name like Norbert Leon Auguste Senciér, changing to Daniel Dancé must have been a relief, don’t you think? My mother called him Dan, so all family members, to avoid confusion, called me Daniel.