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New Year Resolution

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Normally I don’t care for New Year resolutions, in my view one day is much like another. This is something that is also reinforced by shift work – I barely had any idea what day it was, let alone the date. Heck sometimes I didn’t know my own name.
So, one day is very much the same as another one, so why wait for a special date to make a change in your life.
However, this year feels different, in part I think it’s because I’m not in work (I am technically,but it’s… ‘complicated’), so it seems to make sense to mark a certain date, especially with things that have been whirling around my head for quite some time.

Also, if I write them down I’m sort of honour bound to follow them. I may well explain some of them in more detail at a later date.

1) Blog more – As in blog at all. I used to love blogging, then I sort of fell out of the habit of it. Partly because of the reason for resolution 2. Planning on writing something a few times a week, luckily hardly anyone will see it as my days of being a world famous sexy internet ambulance god are far behind me.

2) Play less MMOs – These are a terrible timesink and at my age I’m starting to foresee myself on my deathbed cursing the hours spent playing yet another endless treadmill.

3) Sort out my diet – I successfully stopped being a fully tubby bastard and am now only half a tubby bastard, which wasn’t that hard, but now I have an addition reason to sort out the rubbish that I eat.

4) Get TRUTH BASTARDS done and out into the world – This is a project I’ve been noodling around for a number of years, but never sat down and cracked on with it. Hopefully following Resolution 2 will mean I actually get something into a presentable state.

5) Stop tiptoeing around fuck nuggets – No longer am I going to let complete idiots annoy me/hold me back/make me angry – instead I’m going to either ‘sort them out’ (as we say in my part of the world), or just ignore them completely.

I think will do – I don’t want to be too energetic or enthusiastic. I am English after all.

Sirens, Urgent Care

Passion

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It has been quite a while since I last wrote, and while I would like to say that the reason behind this is because I have been busy, that would be a lie. Unless you count playing ‘Rift’ and lounging around on the sofa watching TV while eating chocolate ‘busy’.

As Sirens is due to air from next week (Sirens being the new name for ‘Naked Apes’, a name change that I believe came from Channel 4) I’ve been doing a fair bit of publicity for it, mostly in print, and one of the questions that I am normally asked is ‘Why did you start a blog?’

The answer is largely in two parts – the first and most superficial part is that I was reading blogs and thought that people were having a whale of a time as a result of them being bloggers and that I wanted to have that sort of lifestyle. The second reason was due to passion.

When I was working on the ambulance service I was passionate about a lot of things. About the way the service was being run, about the patients who would use and misuse the service and about the supporting services and the rest of the NHS. I would be angry about the care that the elderly were getting in nursing homes. I would be frustrated at the lack of working kit on the ambulance. I would struggle to understand how someone with a verruca could consider that an ambulance was an appropriate response. I was joyful about the fun jobs that I would go to.

While a lot of that passion was negative (especially towards the end of my time in the ambulance service), it still provided me with the energy to come home after a twelve hour shift and write about something.

Since changing my job I am a lot more content in life. I don’t have to fret about shift work, I have less pressures from above to do the impossible, I get regular hot meals.  Most importantly I am treated as an adult who doesn’t have to ask for permission to go to the toilet.

What this means is that I am a lot less passionate about my job, and this is a good thing – certainly it is good for my health, but it’s not particularly brilliant for shifting my backside from the sofa to start pounding on the keyboard.

The other reason is that essentially I am starting from the bottom again. I like to think that my insights into ambulance work were reasonable because I was quite good at it and had been doing it for a while before I started writing about it. I am yet to feel ‘expert’ about nurse practitioning, although I am starting to see the patterns of patients that we get.

As confidentiality is a big issue, I can only write about these patterns and generalities so as to not have any possiblity of identifying patients.

I also wanted to spend the first few months at my new job keeping a low profile, sounding out the background and social structure of the place and generally trying to avoid trouble.

However, I’m now starting to get the itch to start blogging again because I’m starting to see the ways in which Urgent Care is used (and abused) and the way in which we fit into the community.

While Twitter has largely replaced my blogging, there are some things that deserve more than 140 characters.