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An interview with Alex Diamond of Diamond Diving. We join Alex on the easydive Antibes dive boat where on a beautiful June day in early season we learn what kind of marine life we can expect to see in Antibes, what level of diver you have to be, and why diving in the med is all about where you dive. The Cote d’Azur is in fact: a world class dive spot.

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Diving with Diamond diving was a pleasure this weekend, but as Alex himself says: “c’est normale”. The weather wasn’t the best for our 2 days in St Raphael, but the hotel was nice and I didn’t really mind the rain on the second day as the wind on the first. The Ile du Lion de Mer was pretty choppy with wind gusting up to about force 4 at times. But here’s what the site has to offer.

“The southern side of the island has a stunning drop off that is rich in gorgonian coral growth carpeting the crevices and cracks to a depth of 40 metres. In one area (La Grotte du Corail – the Coral Cave) there is a great concentration of red coral, lobsters and nudibranches.”

The second dive on Sunday was in a calm, rainy sea off the Ile D’Or was stunning. The water was still 16deg, but being the hardy UK diver I am, I had a proper drysuit with enough padding underneath to keep me warm. The highlight of the dive was seeing a couple of jeuvenive barracuda hanging around looking meanacing.

I’m glad to have caught up with Alex. The great Diamond Diving news is that they’re taking delivery of a new diving RIB this week, which should open up a whole new area of Antibes to any qualifyed diver. The cote d’azur actually is a world class dive site and I’m going to be going back there this year for sure.

Here are some photos from last year’s trip to Antibes. The weather wasn’t really great for photography this trip.

Meanwhile – back in Chamonix. Winter has reared it’s head again and there’s new snow. And it’s still snowing. I think I might well follow a couple of days diving with a couple of days skiing. Perhaps the garden can wait. Damn snow killed my berlotti bean seedlings anyway.

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There’s no point denying it – the ski season is over. The snow has melted and even if the lifts are still running, it’s just not much fun.

So we’re off for a short break on the south coast before whatever comes next. Saint Raphael in fact. I’ve got a couple of dives booked with my mate Alex from Diamond Diving. A couple of days in a nice hotel with some sun and seafood feels like just the ticket right now.

So we’re heading off in the morning, driving south through France. Grenoble, Gap, Grasse. We’ll drive till we find somewhere nice to stop and camp for a night & arrive in St Raph in the morning. I’m diving that afternoon and the next and then we’ll make our way back the other way – through Italy. Camp again, perhaps in Finali or somewhere like that.

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When I first came across Twitter a few years ago (yeh, it has been around that long), I was pretty unimpressed. Far too geeky. I could see the cleverness in the technology but it seemed that only other techie-minded people would see any value in it. Frankly, being updated about what a bunch of web developers are eating for breakfast seemed like a proper waste of time. This was before the iphone, when mobile internet use was still in it’s infancy.

Amazingly Twitter has gone mainstream over the past few months. Due in no small part to the increasing ease of mobile internet use, twitter is being heavily used by all kinds of interesting groups and individuals from the Guardian & BBC to bloggers like Violet Blue .

As it happens I AM interested in what Stephen Fry is having for breakfast.

I see a use for twitter in enriching this blog by using my iphone to micro-update from my phone. There are still people out there who don’t follow the blog by RSS and actually visit the site to see if there are any new posts. The twitter application you see on the right will hopefully provide a bit of interest to those readers.

I also think that just like facebook offered some interesting search-marking opportunities, so will twitter. Just like facebook, your success on twitter is measured purely by the number of followers (friends) you can convince to sign up to your feed. Then it’s a case of not loosing their attention and feeding them interesting stuff.

Many of the readers of this blog are techie enough to have twitter accounts, whether they post to it or not. Thanks to Darko for leading the way, but anyone else who has a twitter account – follow me please!

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It’s Sunday afternoon and raining in Le Tour. I’m spending a bit of time catching up with the world.

I’m not much of a football fan, but I do like to see Ipswich do well. Especially against Norwich (3-2). Even more especially when that means Norwich are now down in the relegation zone. Go on the lads.

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Well, maybe not totally unexpected. The weather forecast and the fact that it dumped a load of snow right down to Chamonix town yesterday gave us a fair idea that the skiing on the Grande Montets would be good today.

What felt odd was that for the past week the weather has been glorious sunshine and very warm. There’s almost no snow left and I’ve frankly been sitting in the garden getting a tan. The idea of skiing at all has been a million miles away.

So four of us with hangovers climbing into ski gear at 9am this morning felt unusual, even though we’ve been doing it for months. And it WAS good. Proper Chamonix powder skiing. Of course it got heavy and bumpy down low, but skiing the front face of the Aiguille Verte was as good as it ever is. The cloud had cleared almost completely from 10:30, rendering the day a few rungs short of epic.

Now come the end of season parties. Tonight’s offering is La La Land at the Podium bar in Chamonix. Rumored to be playing are Transglobal Underground. Trouble is, everyone’s thinking of skiing tomorrow, seeing as it’s still snowing a bit up top.

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Spring marches on at pace, melting all the snow and bringing out the shorts and T-Shirts. But the skiing is in it’s final flourishes. Last week a I went over to Alagna, Italy with a group of friends. It takes a few hours to drive: through the Mount Blanc tunnel and down into the Italian Aosta. So we bought a half day’s ski pass and had a great afternoon booting around in the slush, getting our bearings. But instead of skiing down at the end of the day, weskied over to the Guglielmina refuge and stayed there for the night. It was stunning. As good as the Bonatti Hut I stayed in a few summers ago. 50 bucks for accommodation, dinner and breakfast seemed a bargain for the experience.

Due in equal measure to the amount of wine we’d all managed to consume the previous day and the inclement weather we shelved the plans to go touring the next day, hung around by the fire for a while in the morning before skiing back down to the valley floor and heading home. There’s probably loads of these refuges to stay in all over the alps, and I’m going to make a point of finding and staying in the nicest ones.

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The project I’m planning for this summer that I’m most excited about is the garden. I’m going to grow vegetables. The only problem has been that the chalet I live in is divided into three, with 2 other families sharing the garden. I’ve got permission from my landlord, so I just have to discuss it with the other families (who happen to be the brothers of my landlord)  to make sure I don’t dig up the any part of the garden they usually use and I’m ready to go.

Ready except for the snow on the ground, but that’s melting so quickly at the moment it will only be a week or so before the ground is fully clear of snow and I can start turning it over. In the meantime I’ve got got my seedlings going indoors on the window sill. Spinach, leeks, pumpkin, green beans, berlotti, beetroot and 8 different types of herbs and loads more are all starting to sprout ready for planting out in a few weeks.

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It seems I’ve got a little out of the habit of writing this blog over the past month. I reckon it’s time to start writing it regularly again. I’ve been taking a little time off from work, thinking through and planning what direction I want my work to go when the winter ends. I think I’m anxious to get back to work. That little monster sitting on my shoulder whispering in my ear that I’m not earning any money and that I can’t go on like that for ever is getting less easy to ignore.

Spring is what’s on everyone’s minds in Chamonix at the moment. The winter season is very busy and hectic. It’s hard on a person both physically and mentally – even if you’re not working. The prospect of a little peace and quiet is attractive. I would hate to feel I was wishing the ski season away but I’m glad it’s April.

There are still a few more weeks of Spring skiing to go. Some ski-touring,  some afternoon slush sessions and plenty of sunny days. Then on around May 7th or so there’s the closing party and the season is done. Time to put the boots away and move all the skis down into the cellar for another year.

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