Occasionally, it makes a refreshing change to see Sharm through tourist’s eyes. Those of us who scratch our meagre livings from this lonely outcropping of fossilised coral tend to get stuck in the Monday to Friday 9-5 of it all, especially as it’s more like Sunday to Sunday 8 -6. Replace the M25 with Peace Road, road works with jetty queues and voila, life passes you by in a haze of suburbaness. I must confess, I had become blasé without even realising it. Sunny every day, world class diving at the bottom of the garden, petrol 12p a litre. Same same. Then some friends came over on holiday and all of a sudden it was like being 51 again. We did it all, starting with a mini safari up in Tiran, Hammerhead hunting. Unfortunately, all we saw was 45 minutes of blue. However, it was much better than 45 minutes of green. I really enjoyed Jackson’s’ fire coral garden in the morning sun before all the dailies arrived though, and the kids had a whale of a time snorkelling on Gordon too.

My eldest, who the previous night had won the admiration of both crew and guests alike by catching a pipefish with his handle less toy fishing net, awoke bright and early to re-invent hard hat diving by sticking his head inside a sawn off 25 litre water bottle as he floated around in the middle of South Lagoona. In complete contrast, my youngest desperately wanted to know where all the divers’ bubbles went. Now, this may seem a simple enough question at first but think again, especially when dealing with the delicate feelings of a 5 year old girl. Personally, I like bubbles. They tell me I’m alive, keep my tropical fish happy and are lots of fun at bath time. But even the most paranoid depression about the state of the worlds’ economy caused by the fluctuation of the Euro against the Dollar pales into complete insignificance when compared to the welfare of the innocent bubble as far as a 5 year old girl is concerned. Get this one wrong, and she could be scarred for life! One has to be careful. She might turn to re-breathers out of sympathy. I took a deep breath and carefully explained that she shouldn’t worry because all the little bubbles go to heaven. After you expel the air from your open circuit, ambient pressure balanced, double action, titanium pistoned CS487 2^nd stage, the bubble gets progressively bigger as it heads upwards towards the surface. Then a remarkable thing occurs. She, (and of course a bubble’s female), undergoes rapid binary fission and becomes first two, the four, then eight – and so on - little bubbles, all getting bigger and bigger, all heading upwards, making more and more friends as they go. And that’s the answer. They’re all going up into bubble heaven, otherwise known as the atmosphere. The most efficient re-breather ever, and not a gram of sofnalime required.

Liveaboard lectures on quantum physics over, we moved swiftly on to kite surfing in Dahab. There I discovered that kite surfing involves tying yourself to a parachute and being dragged at the mercy of the wind across the surface of the water before being hauled unceremoniously into the sky, only to be dumped back in the briny shortly thereafter. A very steep learning curve indeed. Not my kind of thing at all. I’ll happily fly a kite, or even sail a surfboard, it’s the necessity for combination that defeats me. To round it all off we did an ‘overnight’ camel trip in the desert. Well, not ‘we’ exactly. I was excused the actual camel riding due to my allergy to crushed nuts. I took the jeep, which has seats, suspension, air conditioning and no fleas. I still got into the spirit of the thing though. I listened to some Neil Young as I waited at the top of the mountain for them with a cold beer in my hand. You can’t do that on the M25