Who's the dunce in the corner?

Tonight I went back to primary school.

I arrived all of 5 minutes late, to be informed by teacher that everyone was waiting for me in order to begin. Two rows of school-style desks crammed into a tiny room and which seat is free? Yes, the inaccessible one in the corner. So everyone has to stand up and shuffle around awkwardly while I squeeze myself in, mumbling my excuse mes and sorries. This was not a particularly good start to my PADI open water dive course. But it was only once I had settled into my seat that the wheels really came off.

"We'll start by going through the self-assessment questionnaires you did over the weekend," says teacher.

I'd like to begin my defence at this point. The guy who signed me up to the course three weeks earlier can at best be described as a chump. He was clearly new to the job, spoke little English, couldn't work out how to charge my card (he claimed they didn't take Visa - a fact that I doubted at the time, and firmly disproved this evening by paying with Visa), couldn't find a wetsuit in my size, tried to make me get changed in front of him and - crucially - didn't mention anything about self-bloody-assessment questionnaires.

Now don't get me wrong - I watched the open water diver DVD. Well, I watched one of the two discs before deciding that it was probably the least interesting thing I had ever watched (and I watched the DVD that Arsenal sent out when we moved to the new stadium which showed you in paintstaking detail exactly how to proceed smoothly through the turnstiles). Not only was it not interesting but it was also utterly, unforgivably sh*te. Very early on it declared - and I quote faithfully here - "Fact: scuba divers have more fun than regular people". You can probably see why I skipped the second disc.

"You have done your questionnaires, haven't you?" asks teacher. Nods all round. "Has anyone not done it?"

This'll be where the wheels came off then. Actually I was not alone - there was another girl who hadn't done it, but she waited patiently for me to cop it before sticking her neck out.

Teacher muttered disapprovingly and explained that we'd all need to pass the exam at the end of the night and if we couldn't do it then we wouldn't be allowed to go diving in Malaysia at the weekend. It's been a while since anyone threatened to ground me.

We started to go over the answers to the questionnaires. My partner-in-crime and I were told to just write them in as we went along. Turns out that everyone had been given their own brand new copy of the textbook except me, who had been lent an old copy by colonel chump. I couldn't write in this as it belonged to the school, so there was a painful wait while I rummaged in my bag for some paper. I didn't have any, so class was stopped (before it had even started) while teacher went out to find me something to write on until I got my own book.

I had just begun to to debate whether my life served any purpose whatsoever when class finally got underway. Teacher went over the questions and people answered them. Naturally I kept fairly quiet but made a point of answering the really easy ones in such a way as to make it look like I could have answered the other ones if I'd wanted to. Matters were not helped by the fact that I was sitting next to Christopher, the class swot. Needless to say he knew all the answers and had done all the questions (on Saturday night, most likely).

I used this 'revision session' to learn all about diving before proceeding to do the exam. I made genuine attempts to copy Christopher but the only time I got a good look at one of his answers I disagreed with it (and I was right in the end so take that Cuthbert) so was largely forced to rely on my own intellect. I spent the first few minutes writing on the wrong side of the answer sheet and had to ask for a new one and start again. Consequently I finished a whole 5 minutes after everyone else and they all waited for me - quietly at first but then they started talking amongst themselves and I would have asked them to be quiet if it wouldn't have drawn attention to the fact that I was the class thicko. Most of them had already got their marked papers back by the time I handed mine in.

So how did I do? Well it's a good job that I'm a quick learner, and that diving theory exams - much like driving theory exams - have a solid array of ridiculously obvious questions, along the lines of: "If you start to develop difficulty breathing and feel pain in your ears and sinuses, should you: A - close your eyes and swim deeper, B - use the sign language you learned at secondary school to tell your instructor to go f*ck himself, C - pull out your diving knife and slash at anything that moves, or D - breathe deeply and calmly, signal to your buddy that you are having trouble and begin to ascend slowly towards the surface?"

It's also a really good job that someone had written several of the answers in my copy of the question book.

I passed. No detention, no lines, no nothing. And I even got a copy of the PADI textbook to call my own. Pool lessons tomorrow and Wednesday then Dayang on the weekend. Woohoo!