Beauty and fear under the sea

When I was a kid, Jacques Cousteau was my main TV man. I loved watching all his underwater adventures and getting a front seat view into all the little fishies (and the big ones).

Then I got older and studied Classics. I remember seeing photos of the Riace Bronzes, two full-size Greek bronze statues of naked, bearded warriors cast about 1500 years before being discovered underwater by a pharmacist snorkelling off the coast of Italy in 1972.

I couldn’t shake the horror of discovering anything bodyshaped while being underwater and having to control your breathing through a little hose into your mouth. The man who found them first saw an arm sticking out of the sea floor and naturally thought it was a dead body. I would have had instant anxiety.

Right now I am in Rarotonga (tough life, I know) holidaying with my friend Paula, and we feel like right little oceanographers, snorkelling about in the briny deep. Nothing in the water is body-shaped except for us.

Snorkelling is such a peaceful experience. All you can hear is the tinkling of water as your flippers or arms break the surface, and the regular deep sounds of your own breathing.

The water is as blue and clear as anything you see on a postcard so with a mask across your eyes in the shallow spots, you can see every grain of sand, every abandoned shell.

There are clumps of coral and rock with all manner of organism growing and regenerating and clinging to their sides. I’ve seen spiny sea urchins – at least I think that’s what they are, I am calling them Ocean Hedgehogs – tucked into crevasses, waiting for unwitting feet.

Suddenly you notice a school of teency fish swimming towards you then darting to the left as one. You see fish the shape of rugby balls, those slender tropical angel fish in multitudes of colour variations and I’ve seen one so extraordinarily translucent and rainbowcoloured that I heard myself say, ‘‘Oh my God’’ to no one but my snorkel.

The trouble with seeing all these glorious fish is they exist alongside other living things. I believe these to be part of the natural eco system but they put the gee whillickers up me.

I’m having to work very hard to pretend the sausage-like lumps of hell-creature lying on the sandy ocean floor are just inflated lumps of seaweed and not what they actually are, which are sea slugs. I want to burp every time I see one and I feel bad because that’s no way to greet anyone I have to share the planet with.

I’ve gone quite animal crackers In Rarotonga. Here, I’m obsessed with roadside chickens. Sometimes I think they are beautiful and interesting, sometimes I see them next to roadside coconuts and think about a free dinner.

Every night we have up to five geckos crawling across the ceiling on our porch. The regular ones, we have named Garry, Larry and Albie (he’s the albino one). They are so skilled at catching the moths and bugs grouped around the lightshade. Two nights ago they tried but failed to catch an enormous dragonfly. We felt their failure personally.

Nature-watch continued apace just last night as Holiday Cat No.1 (apparently called Boris but renamed Suzanne by us) trotted over carrying a rat in her gnashers. She promptly lay about alternating between flinging its lifeless corpse in the air and giving it a wee cuddle.

If my cats did this at home I would be running around yelling less-than-praiseworthy remarks. Possibly calling Student Job Search to perform a removal.

Here, however, I turned on my torch and David Attenboroughed the entire incident, carefully watching Suzanne disembowel, then chew her way through the entire meal, reporting back to Paula the bone crunching and watching Suzanne digest it, tail and all.

Besides the holiday cats, dogs, goats, geckos and chickens, there are other animals.

Paula acts as an excellent guide to these critters. Her alert system is a scream and sudden darting but she does keep me aware that something is about to slither, crawl or flutter across our paths.

Anyway, as I sweat into my keyboard, I’ve just noticed my first Holiday Skink. I must go, he is crawling into my hammock and I need to do something about that.