Taken from Holly’s blog – this has exactly the correct sense of surrealism to amuse me, although the danger aspect of it really does not appeal, and it certainly cannot be worth someone’s losing their life, the notion that under every major body of water in northern England there may lurk a small picket-fenced garden complete with gnomes to the distant Magic Roundabout and Fraggle Rock aspect of my upbringing.

[news.bbc.co.uk]

Underwater gnome threat ‘returns’

A secret underwater attraction that lured several divers to their deaths could have returned, police say.

The “gnome garden” complete with picket fence was removed from the bottom of Wastwater in the Lake District after several divers died a few years ago.

It is thought they spent too much time at too great a depth while searching for the site of the ornaments.

Now police divers say there is a rumour that the garden has returned at a depth beyond which they are allowed.

Pc Kenny McMahon, a member of the North West Police Underwater Search Unit, said the gnomes were well known among the diving community.

Re-reading it, though, it does make me wonder about how far you can take the matter of legally preventing someone from doing something suicidally stupid. The quote from the article:

“But now there’s a rumour about a new garden beyond the 50m depth limit. “As police divers we can’t legally dive any deeper so, if it exists, the new garden could have been purposefully put out of our reach”

…resonates slightly with the Daily Mail and its progeny – Metro, and The Evening Standard – which are the UK’s source of reactionary, right wing, horror-driven news; the horror being, of course, that someone is doing something ill-advised and in spite of authority’s attempts to dissuade them.

In the spectrum of foolish human endeavour I believe that BASE-jumpers are clinically bonkers, Skydivers marginally less so, then Arctic Explorers, Mountain Climbers, Bungee jumpers, and round-the-world-yachtswomen in descending order of insane things that can get you killed… but I not going to wag a finger at any of them, nor “tut” and tell them off, not least because some people I know think I am suicidally insane for riding motorbikes.

If some people want to prove how Über they are by sinking what may be a rather boring two-gnomes-and-a-fencepost-from-B&Q at 50 metres, that’s fine. Likewise if people insist on getting themselves killed in search of it, that’s Darwin. The tragedy is that the sight/effort is probably not worth it, like dying due to falling off a particularly boring mountain. The risk is that it may not be there at all, and that it lacks the grand mythos of Shangri-La, the North Pole, the first-man-on-Mars, or similar, to be socially acceptable enough to die in the pursuit.

It’s about human aspiration; we should never aspire to mediocrity.