Sinking In The Rain is a musical of farcical proportions, a comedy so much funnier than the Hollywood classic Singing In The Rain, that it makes you laugh even though there is heartache, sorrow, pain and abject anguish involved.

All reflected, by the way, on the besieged face of just one poor, maligned man.

England football coach Steve McClaren is officially gone and I say: 'Forgive him for he knew not what he was doing.'

This biblical referencing is actually very relevant as he stood forlornly holding a huge umbrella under the miserable English rain at England's calamitous, no-more-Euro-2008 loss to Croatia a few nights ago.

Because given a lifeline to qualify by Israel's win over Russia, a gift of divine intervention from the Holy Land, McClaren's lads managed to mess up their Holy Grail with bovine interjection, including a big boo-boo by an unfortunate rookie goalie who will be waking up, I'm sure, with cold, shivering sweat until at least 2097.

It's very sad.

Now, while we're on the subject of dying, I went into the water with sharks recently.

At my age, I should be annulling my third marriage, settling alimonies, suing en-bloc neighbours, bailing my kids out of jail or running across the Causeway to avoid loan sharks. So what the hell was I doing in an oversized fish tank with real sharks?

But, man, I may have found my true calling.

It's to go hug sharks, caress fish and touch a coral or two.

My plunge into the aquarium was organised by TV's Discovery Channel and the good folks at Sentosa's Underwater World, a place I've never been to since I quit swimming when my trunks split into two while I panicked during badstroke - not backstroke - training many years ago.

Discovery's fascinating Shark Week programmes run from tomorrow on their cable channel and it's a good thing I didn't see their shows before I went dipping.

Some of the titles are real stay-dry-forever motivators like Top Five Eaten Alive, Shark Feeding Frenzy, Perfect Predators and a very unnerving drama called Ocean Of Fear about a horrific real-life shark-attack catastrophe involving the doomed American warship USS Indianapolis in World War II.

There I was, with a diving mask on my face, strapped onto an oxygen tank, dressed in a scuba suit like Jacques Cousteau, entering the Reef Tank of the Underwater World with my testicles and spectacles abandoned in the locker room.

'Breathe through your mouth, not through your nose,' the patient, helpful divemaster kept telling me.

Dude, that's like telling a man not to peek at the naked woman lying next to him.

How could he not do it?

So I pushed my mask tightly to my face, sucked in air vicariously, grabbed the ladder, did my best impersonation of a sea chicken and tried not to lose it and pee while going under.

Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World.

I discovered a Wet New World.

I've seen Jaws about five times and my jaw dropped about 10 times in the tank.

It was exhilarating.

I've never seen anything more beautiful and that includes the perfect face of the actress Jennifer Connelly.

A stingray, I realise, feels like cotton on the underbelly, while in a restaurant, it just feels expensive.

My friend, an adorable, irrepressible gal, was hugging a docile Leopard Shark as if she was going to marry it and I thought, being the senior person in the water, I might have had the authority to actually wed her to the fish the way some eco-crazy women marry dolphins these days.

The divemaster told me that I may have missed out something in life staying on land working in one place, going back and forth, never trying two.

He's absolutely right.

Fish, unlike people, make life an easy swim.

I'm going in again like an astronaut to the moon, this time with no personal equipment left behind.

That's one small step for man, one giant dip for me.

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