The DiveBunnie Blog

It's been a bit of a Zig Zag

2021-05-15T14:58:00.000+01:00

So... after a period of silence, I've realised my life's been a bit of a zig zag between the performing world and the world of mother nature & sustainability.

As a teen (waaay before it was trendy to be environmentally aware... I really was not a trendy teen 😳) I was a bit of a hippie... I was on the brink of heading to ballet school when one of my friends had mentioned the bourgeois nature of my proposed career 😳 whoops. But this had been my lifelong dream, so I wasn't about to ditch it in favour of Greenham Common. She questioned how I was going to use my dance to speak to the governments and people of influence. Now in a different century, I realise that the arts carries so much more weight than we'd ever realised with our little minds forty years ago.

Anyway, scoot forwards a decade or so... I completed the training and worked as a professional dancer for a good 20 years... I was one of the lucky ones, not only did I work, I got to do some pretty cool jobs... ticking off more boxes of success than I'd ever imagined back as a hippie teenager. But that's another story.

After my performing career, I found myself back in the arms of mother nature having discovered scuba diving & honing my skills counting fish on a random reef in Madagascar, I became a diving instructor! Living & working in the Red Sea I really learned the importance of the oceans to our planet and rediscovered conservation & my hippie roots and thus grew the bulk of this blog.

Then another Zig (or was it a Zag?) & I found myself back in London at the Royal Academy of Dance gaining my Professional Dancers' Teaching Diploma, but keeping my hand in the ocean used my time underwater as inspiration for my final assessment class. In fact, now as a dance teacher, I regularly use mother nature as inspiration for my choreography.

And now I go & discover these guys in a room on Clubhouse... we started talking sustainability, so I opted to focus on the oceans & their importance. Once again my creative head has been inspired by nature & I've started creating a few snap shots from my memories of life underwater. At the same time as raising awareness of the oceans, for every NFT sold, a percentage will go towards ocean conservation.

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Disaster Movie

2020-03-15T06:08:00.003+00:00

Ooh it has been two years since I last wrote here. Possibly because it has been more than that since I personally last SCUBA dived (now that is sad). But this does not mean that I have not been keeping an eye on the underwater world, or the world of Sharm el Sheikh for that matter.

I have watched as friends strived to keep the SCUBA business alive in Sharm whilst the UK maintained their policy of zero flights. It has been with huge excitement that I have watched the resumption of flights and return of guests. It seems like the wildlife has been amazing (possibly due in part to the reduction in tourists). And then kind of typical for this time of year, they had a storm last week... which closed all the jetties once again, and now this... Coronavirus!

Looks like a kind of plankton don't you think?

I have been watching what feels like a slow motion car crash evolve over the last few weeks and have felt very much like I did as we watched the revolution unfold in Egypt ten years ago. Gradually, something that initially seemed like an overreaction has become our reality. A little nugget of "Ooh where is Dustin Hoffman when you need him?" becomes "Oh my gosh... this is for real".
Gestures like giving friends a hug that last week just felt a little rebellious, by this week are completely off the table. One by one countries are shutting their borders and ordering their citizens inside. Shoppers are fighting over packs of loo-roll and hand sanitiser has not been on the shelves for the last two weeks. The world has gone mad.

Being UK based, we still have relative freedom, however we are drifting through life in a bit of a daze feeling like every day might be our last day of freedom and business as usual. Trying to keep focused has been a challenge when you don't even know if you are going to be going to work the next day. I have been choreographing for shows that may never happen and preparing for exams that may well be cancelled. And amongst all that have been answering the questions of anxious students worried that their world is coming to an end.

I made the mistake of watching a film made by a chap in Wuhan yesterday which really brought things home to me. His partner was a medical worker and had caught the virus was self isolating in their home whilst he bravely drove around Wuhan as a volunteer delivering medicine and taking medical staff to work in lieu of the closed public transport. His shots of Wuhan looked like a scene from the movie 28 Days Later. Usually busy roads were absolutely empty, Wuhan stood still... a ghost of a city. Could this be the UK in a few weeks' time?

In one month, life has gone from finally feeling very settled and positive, to suddenly feeling a little all over the shop haha.

But, we are all resilient people and I think if we can all pull together and help each other out, we will get through this. Maybe the overbuying of toilet rolls could be taking things a little too far.

So... hang in there. If you are self-isolating, keep in touch with your friends and family remotely. Thank goodness for the internet. Share your stories of fantastic diving, and think back to those days of blowing bubbles under the waves. Focus on that feeling of dropping beneath the choppy waters and finding that deep calm below the surface.

The DiveBunnie Blog

It's been a bit of a Zig Zag

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