When I told my old friend Mick that I was about to undergo hip surgery, he said, ‘What – are they grafting Jimi Hendrix’s balls onto your forehead?’ Which would have been a reasonable assumption back in 1973, when Mick played bass tambourine in a Ukrainian folk band called The Boris Dancers.
Happily, it was only the Birmingham Procedure, in which the end of the femur is shaved down to accommodate a steel cap that fits slickly into a prosthetic socket, set into the pelvis.
I say ‘the femur’ and ‘the pelvis’ because if I were to say ‘my femur/pelvis’, I would faint.
After ten weeks on crutches, I was allowed to dive again. My new hip activates the metal detectors at airports and, uncertain whether I’d have time to produce my X-rays before our world-renowned bobbies shot me seven times in the head, I decided to dive in the UK.
I had reckoned without the annual works outing of the National Diving Committee of the British Sub-Aqua Club.
I was twenty-two metres down in the North Sea – the only waters in our hemisphere that get stuck between your teeth – when the magnetometer aboard the NDC’s hardboat homed in on my hip.
It was unanimously agreed that I was the wreck of the RMS Iceberg (named by the owners of the Titanic on the principle that if you can’t beat ‘em, you might as well join ‘em).
Their judgement was confirmed by side-scan sonar. I had been unable to exercise since the operation and could now easily be mistaken for a shipwreck.
With the precision of synchronized swimmers, the entire National Diving Committee somersaulted backwards into the brown-grey billows. Those who had remembered their fins and teeth were soon plummeting towards me at a terrifying velocity.
The poor visibility was compounded by a singular circumstance. The charabanc that ferried the members from the sheltered housing had swerved to avoid a band of PADI demonstrators. The crate containing their optical prescription masks had overturned and at the dive site the masks were redistributed by the carers on an entirely random basis.
Consequently, none of the divers recognised that the ‘wreck’ was in fact myself. This wouldn’t have posed a difficulty, had they not resolved to blow off my ‘propeller’ with high explosives. Fortunately for my reproductive prospects, the charge failed to detonate. But they did manage to cut off my weightbelt with an oxyacetylene torch.
This proved to be a critical development. My surgeon had replaced some of my bone with metal. In order to maintain my ideal buoyancy, I had duly replaced some of the metal on my weightbelt with bone.
The bone was that of the last of the dodos, strangled by my great uncle, Brigadier Aubrey ‘Bonkers’ Blackford on the Polynesian island of Totohopomopo. Or so I had always believed.
In fact, an examination aboard the NDC boat quickly established them to be human remains. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Uncle’s nickname was hard-earned and thoroughly deserved. Eating the enemy would have come quite naturally to him.
As I clung, head-down and weightless, to a gorgonia, the members of the NDC put in a call to the Ministry of Defence who declared me a designated war grave. The two mile exclusion zone substantially reduced the likelihood of my rescue so I bit the bullet and let go of the gorgonia.
Miraculously I reached the surface alive – only to be arrested by the coastguard on a charge of cannibalism and the more serious one of importing foodstuffs without a licence.
So while surgery has almost completely restored my mobility, I’m now unable to walk further than the length of the exercise yard at Belmarsh.
Life, eh?
