Cooper Brown: He's Out There

I'm still on honeymoon in Mauritius and it's seriously hot. We've moved hotels because the last one wouldn't give us a discount, despite my writing about the place. Assholes. Our new place is much better anyway.

Unfortunately The Cooperman looks a little like a beet right now as I fell asleep beside the "adult" pool and woke up burnt to a crisp. The worst thing is my eyelids – they got burnt bad and it really hurts when I blink, so I try to avoid doing it for as long as I can. This freaks Victoria out – she says I look like a serial killer.

It's already got me into trouble. Despite the expense of this place, meals are taken in a buffet style, like we're in one of those "Mövenpick" restaurants, which means that, should I wish, I can mix Lebanese, Chinese and Indian on one plate. Personally, I'm pretty partial to sushi and I was hanging around the raw bar waiting for the chef to prepare one of my favourite things in the world, a huge shrimp and avocado roll.

The sushi chef is quite a temperamental guy at the best of times – experience has taught me that, like an super-trendy DJ, he doesn't do requests. If you're after something in particular then you just have to wait until he decides to produce it. On my first night here, the honeymoon pressure was still on and I needed some energy. I asked the guy for some sashimi and he went mental – he started shouting and swearing in Japanese and I eventually had to admit defeat and head for the far friendlier Palestinian guy, who gave me some killer falafel that, weirdly, left me totally unable to perform. I think it was the green chilli.

Anyway, I'm patiently waiting for the shrimp and avocado roll and trying not to look pissed off. The problem is the staring – I can't blink and I keep looking the sushi chef's way. He catches me staring a couple of times and, on the third occasion, he fixes me in some kind of kamikaze stare-off. Now, I've become pretty good at not blinking and there's no way I'm giving in to this asshole. He puts his sushi "equipment" down and we get into a total High Noon situation.

A queue starts to build up at the counter but nobody is backing down. After a good four minutes, the chef cracks and has to blink. I laugh and he goes berserk. He actually tries to jump over the counter to attack me. I guess that it all got too much for him. This probably wasn't how he saw his life panning out when he left his little fishing village in search of the good life. A couple of fellow staff members pull him back and he is taken into a back area to chill out. The battle of the Mauritius Sushi Counter was won by... yours truly, and I really felt that you should know about it.

Meanwhile, Victoria had decided that we should both learn to scuba-dive, as we were getting a bit bored lying around doing nothing. We had a couple of lessons in the pool and then had to spend two days in a classroom, which wasn't exactly my idea of fun. I bought this top-of-the-range dive watch in the scuba place and it does everything we are being taught for us. This is lucky, as I didn't have a clue what the instructor guy was on about most of the time.

It's a typical situation where deadbeat hippies give themselves a supposedly important job when technology has already rendered them pointless. Anyway, we finally get out in the boat and head off for our first proper dive. We have to go out of the lagoon because the local fishermen have been very keen on dynamite fishing and there is nothing but dead coral to see.

We cruise over the reef, and we all get in the water. The hippie instructor gives us the signal to go down and we let the air out of our jackets. I start to descend and get ready to equalise – this stops your ears exploding with the pressure. I get down to about 10 metres and I take a big breath and... nothing... there's no air and I panic, big time. I shoot straight back up towards the surface, forgetting everything that they taught me about controlled ascents and all that shit.

I burst up and take a huge gulp of air but then start to feel really weird straight away. I'm dragged on to the boat by the local dive assistant moron, who, it turns out later, forgot to turn my tank on. The hippie instructor surfaces and starts going on about how he's worried I have "the bends" because I came up too fast.

I try to explain that I prefer to come up too fast than die, but I'm finding it hard to talk. They gun the boat back to shore and I'm then shoved into a local taxi with a guy who drives like an idiot for half an hour until we get to the place where they have a decompression chamber. I'm put into what is essentially a vacuum and have to stay in it for six hours.

Victoria comes to visit after her dive – she peers through the thick glass in the door as though she's at the zoo looking at some weird species of pink chimp. She's laughing her head off and I flick her a V-sign. I want to come home. I'm bored of my honeymoon. I need a night at The Electric. Cooper Out.

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