Today was extremely windy, one of the things that I learnt when I was pretending to be a teacher was that if there is high wind, the kids will go nuts. It's not just the children that go crazy, it seems some of the adults will go mad as well. On my first job, a grand total of seven pedestrians leapt out in front of my ambulance. I managed to miss all of them which was a minor miracle as I hadn't had my early morning cup of tea – and was therefore not properly awake, and in a bit of a foul mood. Luckily I had the 'pride of the fleet', a decrepit model LDV with the acceleration of an arthritic snail.
My mood wasn't helped by the 14 year old boy who, having been slapped by his stepdad, called the police and an ambulance. The boy (who has been permanently excluded from school) had an argument with his stepfather, who had then slapped him on the neck. Absolutely no injury at all, and I'm sure my buttocks had gotten worse than that when I was a kid. This stroppy child had wasted the time of four policemen and an ambulance – all because he had probably misheard some of the recent debate about smacking.

My personal view is that children are like puppies, they sometimes need the shock of pain to learn a lesson – all the 'hippy' ideals of the eighties have bounced back as teenagers who have no respect for discipline.

It's not just the children either, one of our jobs was to a school where a twelve year old boy had been in a fight, his sister, who was about 25 years old was there with her friends, and she was shouting about how she was going to beat up the kid that had hit her brother. My crewmate decided that the best thing (given that the hospital was no more than 1000 yards away) was to ignore her comments and get them offloaded onto the hospital as quickly as possible. I was grinding my teeth the whole way, the sister was extremely aggressive and constantly 'mouthing off' about how she was going to cause trouble. When we got to the hospital she asked me 'where's the toilet?', and I must admit it took a serious effort of will not to ask her where the 'please' had gotten to. The last we heard of her, was her shouting in the childrens waiting room “I ain't gonna f**king turn off my mobile, I read in the paper it don't do f**k all to the machines”.

She could do us all a favour by stopping breathing.

But it wasn't all bad, we had two calls, one after another to an 'Arthur'. Neither of these two elderly men were particularly ill, but both were very likable. One had a habit of inserting 'f**k' in the middle of sentences, as in 'My pills are in the f**king cupboard over there'. Arthur doesn't mean any offence by it, it is just the way he is, we occasionally get people like him and you can have a nice little joke with them in the back of the motor. That this habit of swearing is the same one my crewmate has, and that Arthur looked like how my crewmate could look in 30 years, only added to the fun.

The second Arthur lives in a warden controlled flat, and when we turned up a woman was fussing over him, when we asked him if it was his wife he replied, ' If I had married her, I'd have topped myself by now'. The woman was actually his warden as was quite bossy.

Not a bad day (no-one died on us today), I'm working the same shift for the next six days, so we'll see how it goes tomorrow.