Quit your day job. Go on. I dare you.

I used to love Wimbledon. I knew the players - boris becker, steffi graf - martina bloomin‘ navratilova. I can’t get the BBC iPlayer outside of the UK without a dodgy UK proxy which never works brilliantly here TBH. But I’d love to follow Wimbledon this year - how should I do it? Radio 5 live perhaps? I don’t have TV, especially not UK TV. Anyone got great ideas? Has anyone got a sling media box set up that they could let me use for the fortnight? I’d be very grateful :)

It was a really great holiday. The money issues were sorted out fairly quickly by giving some random yank a lift down to the coast & him chipping in for fuel. Also, just simply taking the decision not to spend any money. It’s amazing how little you need to spend sometimes, even in the South of France. I’ve got a fridge in the van, the wherewithal to cook all my meals, to camp out - to do everything I need to do. Money - it’s overrated at times. No need to be kept prisoner by the lack of it.

To be honest what I really needed from the trip was some sun. It had been pissing down in Chamonix for a month and we all had cabin fever. The weather down on the coast was amazing. Hot English summer type weather; 27+ degrees & sunny, with a sea breeze in the evenings to cool off. Perfect.

So anyway, I turned up in Antibes on Tuesday night and met up with Alex in the Blue Lady. One of the snottiest, yachtiest bars in a town famous for snotty yachtiness. He sorted me out with my hotel and let me know where to meet him the next day for the diving. All that side of things was already paid for you see :) So 8:30am I was at the Port Gallice getting my kit together and hanging out in the van. Since I’ve carpeted it and removed a row of seats has actually become a very handy place to hang out. It’s 2 years since I last dived and I was pretty nervy. I’m probably getting a bit old, but diving can be pretty dangerous and there’s not much room for screwing things up.

But there were no problems. 2 great dives during the day off an lighthouse just off the coast from Antibes. Then it was time to start the learnin’. I was there to do some further diving qualification with Alex - to become qualified to dive on Nitrox. There are many good reasons to dive on Nitrox (normal air with extra oxygen added to it) - safety and longer bottom times are the usual reasons, but for me it is also that diving on Nitrox is a far nicer experience than diving on air. Less headaches, less tiredness at the end of the day, and frankly having load more oxygen in your system is always going to feel great.

It’s the best drug in the world, Oxygen. Impossible to overdose, and a cure-all for pretty much everything that ails you. Just a shame it’s so damn expensive to buy medicinal oxygen. The only problem with diving on Nitrox is that breathing too much oxygen at depth can cause a contidition called Oxygen Toxicity. This makes a diver convulse and pass out. Not neccessarily dangerous in itself, but underwater you’re bound to spit out your regulator and drown immediately. So that’s a risk you have to manage with proper training and dive tables etc.

So that evening, an imrovised dinner at the hotel followed by a couple of drinks on the promenade in Juan Les Pins as the sun went down. I went to bed a very happy man. The next day’s diving was even better. 2 great dives off the Cap d’Antibes, this time breathing 33% Nitrox mix. It makes such a difference to the quality of the dives.

Alex was getting frustrated with me for not knowing anything about the theory of partial pressures etc. It’s 13 years since I did my original open water course and learned how to plan dives properly with tables that I simply didn’t remember how to do it. I dive on a computer, and they take care of all that stuff for you. So lunchtime was a 2 hour theory lesson over lunch before the second dive of the day, and then back to Alex’s place to take the exam. Amazingly I passed it the first time around with a decent score and bosh - I’m now a qualified Nitrox diver meaning I can buy enriched air fills from any dive operation offering the service all over the world.

Diving with Alex was a pleasure. Alex and I are friends (me having been his first ever client when he set up his business), but as a diver he’s a consumate professional dive instructor and he took me through my course and dived with me for 2 days in such a calm, collected way it made the whole course an absolute pleasure. There’s a little film in the pipeline - an advert for Diamond Diving - coming in a week or so.

So that was that. Friday night I left Antibes around 6pm, and drove an hour or so inland past Grasse (the town from the book ‘Perfume’), had dinner in a small village brasserie and then carried on for a while until I found a deserted parking spot near Castellane in Haute Provence. With all the kit - tent, air matress, water, stove for coffee in the morning, camping is an easy pleasure and set me up for the rest of the drive back to Chamonix the next day.

So a great trip. Well planned, well executed and successful in all regards. And now, back in Chamonix, the weather has finally turned & it’s hot and sunny. Summer weather at last.

I’m off diving today. Down to Antibes on the Cote D’Azur to dive with a friend of mine, Alex, who runs a dive operation down there, Diamod Diving.

Aside from the adventure of the actual diving I have another, unwelcome adventure at the same time. Although I’ve already paid for the diving & accomodation etc, I haven’t got the money for the fuel to get down there and back. That’s all part of being a freelancer. Getting paid at the whim of some accounts department whenever they feel like it. So even thought there’s a couple of £K on it’s way into my UK account, I’m still going to have to drive the long way around through Grenoble down to the coast because I haven’t got enough money for the tolls & tunnel charges.

Still, it’s all part of the adventure & I’m not going to let a little thing like money get in the way of this holiday, I’ve been looking forward to it for weeks. I just hope that the EUR 125 I have in my wallet, the full tank of diesel and the debit card which might stop working at any moment will take me all the way :)

Cham locals all had a massive day’s skiing yesterday. It has been snowing for days and and the first blue-sky day after a snowfall promises powder for all. Fresh tracks on something steep in snow up to your knees is something we all dream about. In fact, it’s why most of us are here.

So a good day for the last race of the Cham winter ride competition. I joined Mark and this time around Katy Mac on the Grande Montets leg of the competition. Blue sky this time, but the course was so long. From the very top of the top lift down thefall-line of the front face to the top of the Bochard Schuss. That’s about 4km in terms of distance, and nearly 1km of vertical drop - as long and as steep as the men’s downhill competition, but in a way more difficult because this is un-pisted big-mountain skiing.

I can’t think of anything more challenging anywhere & that’s why I live in Chamonix, not Meribel. We raced some of the best freeriders in the world. Which is why I came second from last in the men’s ski category. But hey - I was last in my previous competition, so I’m happy to be moving up the rankings. 6 and a half minutes was my time. My thighs were burning and demanding I stop after only a quarter of the race was gone. All I wanted to do was stop, breathe, rest but there’s no points for that. No points for style either. Just boot it down to the finish line as fast as you can. The top skiers completed the course in just over 2mins . I reckon Bode Miller would struggle to compete against that. It’s basically just pointing your skis from the top of the Grande Montets. None of yourmincey little piste turning stuff.

Knackered as we were, Mark and I wanted to do something we’ve been talking about all season. To just simply go skiing with the sole purpose of creating some great photographs for the new website/brochures etc. It’s hard work. You have to get the angles right, the skiing has to be perfect, the shutter has to be clicked at the perfect moment and the camera correctly focused to get the shot. All that and also some tricky mountaineering skills to get to the areas of mountain that are untouched.

Here’s a couple of the best ones. I’ve had to photoShop the hell out of them (which shows up my lack of skill as a photographer), but I think we’re getting there. I think we’re starting to do someprO photography now.