Two divers and, in the middle, a great instructor

Winding down
It's six in the morning and I'm back out on my balcony watching the sun come up over the town. In three days I'll be coming home, and obviously I have bittersweet feelings. It will be great to see everyone again, but my plan was for the trees to be in bud by the time I got back, baby moorhens to be paddling around Highgate Ponds and everyone breathing in that fresh, spring air that cleans the city. Apparently, that's not going to be the case, and I won't pretend that it hasn't been lovely to be 5,092 miles away from the snow. 

My friends Benjamin and Simba are here at the moment, having come from London and Rio/Sao Paulo*/San Francisco/Goa/wherever respectively to hang out and do some diving. [*New laptop frustration continued: even though I can type ñ with one finger on my Spanish keyboard, and ¬ with two, whatever it is, I can't find any way of typing the letter "a" with a tilde over the top of it, as in Sao Paulo. It's probably incredibly easy, but bear in mind that my keyboard also has a button that says 

                                                         Imp Pant
                                                          Pet Sis

that I haven't dared press yet. We're a long way from Cupertino, Dorothy.] Ben, although he won't know it until he reads this, became my first ever real customer as a divemaster on Wednesday, when I took him out in the sea all by myself for a refresher dive. Luckily (a) he is a very good diver and happy to pootle along and (b) the sea was pretty and calm that day. I was aiming to take him to the little garden of plants, fish and lobsters, that Tullio and I found when we were "making" the famous "map" but my navigation skills are still rudimentary so, despite having a compass, I couldn't find it anywhere. I had given up and was taking us on a broad arc through the water that would land us on the beach in front of Papaya Playa when suddenly we were in middle of it, surrounded by lovely, undulating plants and brightly coloured playful fish (though no lobsters that I could see). It was like a Disney finale to the dive. Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow - which is a very good read, by the way - gives a lot of evidence to show the huge role luck has in almost everything we do. (He is particularly scathing about fund managers and their claims to skill.) When the garden appeared in front of me (about 200 metres and 180 degrees on the compass away from where I thought it was) I couldn't have agreed more.

Simba is an accomplished diver but did his certification when we were all at university and they still had those rubber suits with brass helmets. So he took the opportunity to do take his PADI Open Water certificate with Tullio. I will leave him, if he sees this, to comment himself on Tullio's teaching but I was really proud to have introduced them and it was great to see one of my oldest friends and one of my newest getting on so well and working together. At the start of all of this, I wrote about how Tullio and I were developing more of a mentor-like relationship than simply teacher-student. It has been that and much more. I will miss him and I have been changed and energised by his teaching, friendship and company. Tullio is not someone to pass up a party. But he is also serious, empathic and thoughtful, and a loyal friend - a fine man it has been an unexpected pleasure to meet. I hope we see each other again many times.

Today we are renting a car and driving to the Mayan ruins at Coba, then to Valladolid for lunch and then taking SImba to the airport. The toot-toot man who sells bread from his tricycle is just passing, so I'll run downstairs, by a bun and cycle up to Hertz. Pics from the roadtrip later.