This one will be painted but they also send the shields to us after each performance so we can hammer them back into shape. The drawers (3) are full of bits and pieces of armour, buckles - anything and everything. We use both a sheet-metal folder (4) and a cut-off saw (5) for bending and chopping solid materials. For Troilus and Cressida we made swords from these templates (6).

Basically we draw around them - a bit low tech, but it works. We make swords from an aircraft-grade aluminium - when they clash together on stage it makes a really good sound. When Fiona Shaw played Richard II she used this sword (7), and this skull (8) is from a production of Hamlet. We also do effects with flames and water - we made these torches (9) for Troilus, but someone usually has to die in drama and I suppose that's where we really come into our own.". Spring is here and the country's mansions are dusting off the Hepplewhites, ready for the annual invasion of daytrippers. This century has not been kind to the stately homes of England. Already in a parlous condition by the Thirties ("mortgaged to the hilt", according to Noel Coward's 1939 song), many were requisitioned during the Second World War and the interiors chopped up for firewood.

Returning aristocrats could afford neither the repairs nor inheritance taxes and at least 2,000 were torn down. In recent years enterprising owners have turned their estates into safari parks, conference centres and sets for period dramas, but others have given up. The National Trust now runs over 200, yet despite 12 million visitors a year, four out of five run at a loss. Diana Owen, manager of Petworth House in West Sussex (with an art collection including Van Dycks and Turners plus gardens by Capability Brown) reveals the grim cost of keeping those panelled doors open. Estate of the nation (regular costs): wages for ticket sellers, parking attendants, cleaners, pounds 36,500; minor repairs, pounds 5,000; heating, lighting, pounds 15,000; office costs, pounds 4,200; loo rolls, light bulbs, cleaning materials, pounds 1,500; recruitment, pounds 2,000; rent, rates, pounds 3,500; phone, pounds 3,000; alarms, pounds 14,000; travel costs for staff and volunteers, pounds 16,000; vacuum cleaners, dust covers, pounds 10,000; collections conservation, pounds 12,000; equipment (photocopiers, ladders etc), pounds 2,000; estate repairs, tree surgery, pounds 16,000; garden kit, pounds 2,800; plants, petrol, compost, pounds 3,800; staff wages, pounds 191,700; repairs to main house and cottages, pounds 62,700; cottages' rent and rates, pounds 13,500; equipment depreciation, pounds 11,600; marketing, banking, insurance, management, pounds 191,000; miscellaneous, pounds 2,000. Subtotal pounds 619,800 Grand schemes (ongoing repairs) Deathwatch beetle removal, pounds 1m; stable block repair, pounds 480,000; conservation of Grinling Gibbons carvings, pounds 30,000; repair of 18th-century table, pounds 5,000; iron screen around Pleasure Ground, pounds 130,000; new roof for Rotunda, pounds 138,000.Total pounds 2,402,800. ou can breathe through it, spit through it, cough through it or puke through it," Martin the teacher is saying.

"In fact if you do puke through it the fish will love it and swim after you to eat it." He is holding aloft a regulator - the teacup- sized block of plastic that's supposed to feed us compressed air while we're underwater. Everyone solemnly examines their regulator; mine appears to be smattered with other people's gritted teeth marks. When I accepted my mission to learn to scuba dive, I had envisaged myself shivering at the bottom of some verruca-ridden swimming baths in north London. But as luck and an overdraft extension would have it, the reality is rather different: I'm standing on a palm-treed beach in the Maldives.

Being cold is not an issue; I'm more worried about remembering which tube does what, whether my lungs will burst under the pressure and if I'll get eaten by a shark. A more immediate problem is that, having strapped on the weight belt and air tank, I cannot actually stand up. I flail about on the sand like a stranded turtle, regulator clutched in one hand, quadriceps straining. "Um," I clear my throat, "excuse me?"My classmates all stand without any apparent problem and begin collecting up their fins and masks "Help," I croak, and one of them deigns to haul me upright. I stagger irritably into the sea like an octogenarian peasant burdened with a month's supply of firewood The first moments in the sea are the strangest.