At the bottom of the North Sea, out of air and with no hope of rescue, I said goodbye to all my dreams

‘I don’t have the right to tell you what death’s like – I didn’t die’ … Chris Lemons. Photograph: Maria Spann/The Guardian

It was, says Chris Lemons, “very much a normal day at the office”. Until things went wrong. But when they went wrong, they went wrong very badly, very quickly. The “office” was actually the bottom of the North Sea, where Lemons was left without air for almost half an hour.

Lemons was working as a saturation diver, living in a pressurised chamber onboard a specialised ship for stints of up to a month, and being lowered to the seabed in a diving bell to work on offshore structures. “It is a serious business, but it is routine for us. That bell going down is like the taxi to work. I always felt comfortable down there.”