h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

A great weekend caving. Did a couple of good trips with three very old friends, one of whom is just getting back into proper caving as a result of a (hopefully temporary) ban from diving after a recent serious bend.
Not mega-hard trips, (Tatham Wife and Lancaster->Wretched Rabbit) but excellent fun, and reasonably tiring done at respectable speed without any real waiting around.
On the Lancaster trip we went the dry high-level route, since heavy rain had rendered the streamway route impassable, and I got so hot I had to ditch my thermal top and just wear salopettes and oversuit, which was a bit sticky but definitely more pleasant.

Visited the industrial museum in Manchester on the way back on Monday to kill a bit of time. Excellent museum with some great exhibits, though whoever wrote the stuff in the nuclear power section seemed to have only a passing knowledge of the subject, and had made quite a few mistakes.

You can be banned from diving after a recent serious bend??

I didn't know that.

I thought you'd done a typo and your friend had been banned from driving.

It was a doctor's very strong recommendation that he never does mixed-gas deep diving again, and stays off any diving at all for several months (and then stays above 30m), but it sounds like a very nasty bend - starting off with initial paralysis of all 4 limbs and breathing difficulties, with a helicopter ride up to a medical facility in Aberdeen and 5 days in and out of chambers. It was a bit odd since he was only going down to about 25m on air, and followed decompression times scrupulously, and he's been much deeper many times before, though he was a bit tired and somewhat dehydrated.
Fortunately, the only effects a few weeks later seem to be loss of temperature sensing in part of one leg, and mild but diminishing effects on balance and short-term memory. Given what can happen to some people, he was probably very lucky.

Lucky that he's still with us, yes.

I hope he continues to recover.