“What is so enticing about the underwater world? Physical grace: I imagine it’s like dancing for those who can, instead of being, like me, a person shifting gormlessly from foot to foot. But with 15m of water over my head, now we’re talking. You can shimmer, glide and hover with balance while the bubbles rise in slow spirals around you. Another of the paradoxes of diving is the relationship between mass and emptiness. There’s a calming insubstantiality about being at depth, an experience of both heavy materiality (have you ever tried to pick up a scuba tank?) and a very bearable lightness of being. Behind you the awkward fumbling characteristic of shoreline entries when, fully kitted-up in heavy surf, you blunder towards a thin crack in a reef’s edge, banging your knees and elbows on hard, resistant things. Before you is tranquil liberty, as you push through the same water whose eruptive surface moments ago threatened stability, injury and temper. Now it supports your every movement. You are poised. It is the only time I ever feel physically graceful.

Then there’s the light. Though some divers have a fetish for depth, and serious depth does have its attractions, the best stuff for a plodder like me is usually in the first 20m. I’d rather warm water, a wide variety of coral and strong sun above. The most abundant, colourful and zany, if not the most dramatic forms of aquatic life, live in the top 15m. Watching the play of strong sunlight over the breathtaking forms of coral heads or waving vegetation, with fish going through them at all speeds imaginable, and possessing all the colours conceivable, is bliss.”

Read the full story in the Times Higher Education.