Let’s get this straight here, there’s an armed man who’s wanted for murdering a number of people and has made threats against both the police and members of the public in general. He is likely to be highly stressed, emotional, tired and not really thinking clearly. Oh, and he’s got a gun. Police have found him and they’re “negotiating”.

Great, fine, important news. How do you think that should be reported?

How about by broadcasting a live telephone interview with someone who has a line-of-sight view to the proceedings? By having your presenter stood at the edge of the inner cordon after being asked to stay in his vehicle? By trying to catch a glimpse of the gunman through the trees? By intervewing an emotional woman about the fact that her mother was told in no uncertain terms to stay indoors for her own safety and rebroadcasting the clip where she says her mother had a gun shoved in her face?

Am I the only one that believes that those tactics are completely irresponsible?

I see that Northumbria Police have now created a 10 mile exclusion zone.

I hope they enforce it. I also hope that the BBC gets a damn good lambasting for its behavour – I’m just as disgusted with Sky who apparently have been doing similar things, but I expect this kind of sensationalist US-style news reporting from Sky. I don’t expect it from the BBC.

I feel very strongly for freedom of speech. I believe everyone has the right to an opinion* and that they also have the right to voice that opinion. Free speech is what a functional society must be based on, the open and frank discussion of ideas, of faults and of mistakes. If one person makes a mistake that harms someone, then everyone should learn from it. I commented on this on Mark Reeves‘ blog this week and I’ve made my position clear before numerous times.

Most importantly, this doesn’t absolve the individual from their responsibility to keep private information that should not be made public. For example, when I attend an incident and want to blog about it, I have to weigh up free speech against an individual’s right to privacy as well as my own professionalism in the approach that I take to whatever topic it is I’m writing about.

This week, a controversial topic has arisen on a website that I’m an admin on. There have been some comments made in public on what is essentially a private matter between two management groups. Although I don’t believe that such comments should be made public since the issue is an internal one and it’s not in the public interest to air it. What’s worse is that the comments that were made were immature, inflammatory and unprofessional. They managed to serve no purpose than to bring their own organisation into disrepute. After a brief conversation with the appropriate managers, a decision was taken to remove them – a decision I did not take lightly.

At the moment I’m furious. Removing those comments left a bad taste in my mouth. However, I cannot condone their behaviour and the comments were harmful to the entire organisation. What disgusts me most is that some of these are people that should know better. They are professionals and they have achieved nothing other than to inflame an already difficult situation and make themselves look like fools.

People should stop and think before putting fingers to keys. As someone once said to me “Don’t ever say anything on the internet that you wouldn’t say in an interview on TV.”

* When I say opinion, I mean just that. Opinions should not be presented as fact, and if you present rumour as fact you should be prepared to stand up and apologise as loudly as you shouted your fact in the first place when you’re proven wrong.

Every organisation has its own internal politics – it’s just how life is. Some play power games, some want money, some build empires, and some just want to get on with the job. Politics in voluntary organisations can be particularly bad – it’s not that surprising when you get a bunch of people together who all believe passionately enough in a cause to donate that amount of time and effort. It’s the main reason I stopped my work with the First Responders – between the voluntary side and the involvement with the ambulance service, there was just too much politics. Mountain Rescue in this area has traditionally had some interesting politics, but never let it get in the way of the job.

So when Mountain Rescue politics did kick up last week, it caught me by surprise and annoyed me. More than that, it blindsided Sean. As a result he’s now announced that he’s no longer interested in joining the team, which is a shame – I was really looking forward to working with him on jobs and seeing him do well on the team.

Thing is, it’s got me thinking and has got me pretty angry right now. Do I really want to be part of a wider organisation who can treat people like that? I love the job that we do, I love getting in there and doing the job, and I know that 99% of the people in the organisation are there to do the same as I am – get on with rescuing people. But I find myself questioning my membership over the event. I’m sat here at the moment while there’s a rescue going on a few valleys away thinking about my membership and my commitment and other things – my hayfever, my contribution. Hayfever’s stopped me halway out the door today because I realised that if I wandered up a hill with the pollen this thick, I’d be collapsing in a heap of mucus, sneezes and wheezes before I reached the casualty. No drugs can stop that amount of pollen from affecting me.

So my head’s in a mess with a million different thoughts going through it right now. I’m damn well sure however, that I’m not going to let politics or the team come between Sean and I.

Postscript: I toyed with the thought of posting this for a while. I’m aware that several people will read it and feel like I’m airing the organisations dirty laundry in public. However, I feel strongly that since I started this blog that I would comment on the things that I came across that mattered to me, whether positive or not.

I have to say that I think this is the most disgusting, embarrassing series of images I’ve seen of Cardiff. I love the city, there’s plenty to be proud of – but of a weekend night it seems to descend into hell.

Where is the local authority – those rubbish bins are far too small and too few. Where are the landlords and licensees that they’re selling alcohol to such inebriated customers without consideration for the law? Where is the Welsh Assembly in the lack of funding available for the police to deal with this kind of behaviour?

Reported widely on the BBC, I read it today and was surprised to see the MSP at odds with the police already – along with both Scottish Labour and the Lib Dems:

“I thought there was an over-reaction in terms of deploying riot police which possibly enflamed the situation…” MSP Fraser, BBC New

Personally as soon as I read his comment, I though his opinion was unlikely to be true. The police certainly weren’t amused and neither was Machester council leader, Sir Richard Leese, who said:

“If you are going to put blame on anybody you put blame on those people for their behaviour – they have to take responsibility.” Sir Richard Leese, BBC News

The police, who where policing a very difficult situation it seems felt it necessary to issue riot gear to the officers on the ground in order to control the crowds. Given that the MSPs in question weren’t there, I have to wonder how they think they’re talking anything but absolute rubbish. Of course, they’ve ended up with large amounts of egg on their faces now as GMP have released CCTV footage of the crowds, shown here on the BBC website. Quite frankly, looking at that footage, I think if I was that poor officer I’d be shitting myself with a mob of violent, angry and likely drunken hooligans bearing down on me. I can only imagine what that must have been like for him and all respect to him.

Of course, the wrong and allegedly honorable MSP Fraser has now issued a statement, not to camera this time, where according to the Beeb, he’s had to “temper his comments”. Apparently, after viewing the CCTV “the situation was more serious than [he] first suspected” and “The attacks on police officers and paramedics are deplorable and have to be condemned without reservation.”

So apart from thinking that the hooligans involved in the violence and riots should be strung up, I have to admit that my opinion of this MSP is now very low given that he seems to think he can judge a situation better than trained and experienced officers on the ground. Idiot.

First of all my car died. I ended up renting one for a week, followed by borrowing one from a used car dealership that was able to get me out of a very difficult situation, but that’s a different post. Finally, I managed to find a new car – a nice shiny red VW Golf estate which has impressed me a lot. I’m loving it.

So in my nice new car I was heading to base this morning, not to work and for once not to a callout. Meeting at base at 1000 we set about to prepare ourselves and the base for today’s event – a royal visit.

At about 1400 today, a number of cars pulled up outside base and out stepped Prince William. As the news reports, he was visiting a number of places in the valleys and stopped off to see us as his final visit of the day. We had some fun prepared for him – some hobnobbing with the local dignitaries, a light lunch and then change and head up to Morlais Quarry where we took him to the top off the cliff and he got to lower someone down a cliff – I don’t think his protection detail would have been too amused by my idea of lowering him off the edge of a cliff, but nevertheless, we had some great photo opportunities. It was a great day with fantastic weather and we all thoroughly enjoyed.

That’s when it all went downhill though, because on the way home, some drunken twat drove into my nice shiny new car and drove off without stopping. The damage isn’t too bad, it was a glancing blow but it’s knackered one of my wheels (it’s bent the actual metal bit) and twatted my rear door and rear wing, and after a drive tonight, I think it might have done something to the suspension or thereabouts. I only managed to grab a partial index – “S633…”, and I know it was a pale blue or silver hatchback – a large one, quite wide. Beyond that, the prick didn’t even slow down – no brake lights. I’ve just got home after filling in a police report which was gratifyingly easy and quick, though the nice young PC didn’t hold much hope of catching the turd, and reckoned he was probably drunk anyway.

Great.

Tonight was agaKin out with the ambulance service – something I’m really enjoying though it is frustrating at times. It’s frustrating because the knowledge that I have in terms of diagnosing and treating some conditions through mountain rescue could be applied here – giving Hypostop to diabetic patients having a hypo; giving Entonox to patients suffering from painful trauma; giving aspirin to a patient suffering from a possible heart attack - just three examples where we could make even more of a difference to the community.

Take the last few calls for example. We had a two hour battle with a lovely old guy who was having a very bad hypo – only the second of his life and he’d had diabetes for some 20 years. When we turned up, the wife was able to take a blood glucose measurement for us and between us we managed to get him to take some sugar and some jam. We can’t perform blood glucose measurements ourselves and we don’t carry Hypostop (actually I do for mountain rescue but can’t use it for ambulance service calls). I’ve had a call to an elderly lady who fell – a “nan down”. She’d broken her femur, that much was obvious from the swelling and deformity, but she might also have done some damage to her knee. I had no analgesia – we don’t carry Entonox – and so I could do nothing for her other than monitor her and keep her company. The last 20 minutes of the hour-and-a-bit I spent with here were very worrying – she was starting to deteriorate and I had nothing I could do or give her to treat her. If the crew hadn’t arrived as I was getting my phone out, I would have been on the phone to control to ask for an RRV to back me up – I was concerned at that point about her slipping into hypovolaemic shock. Finally, a few weeks ago, I saw a gent who was complaining of classic heart attack symptoms, and all we could do was watch and wait. I did call for an RRV on that one because I was worried, possibly not necessary, but I’d rather be dragging an ambulance officer out of bed to come and slap on a 12-lead ECG for nothing than having my patient die.

So a frustrating time at the moment. If the ambulance service insist on sending us to these calls where we are currently achieving nothing but stopping the clock, then at least give us that tiny bit more in terms of skills and equipment that could make such a huge difference to someone’s life.

I’m also part of a community known as UKNOT. UKNOT has an RSS aggregator that grabs a bunch of blogs and presents them nice and neatly. Only problem is that since my blog’s been on there, the text in the titles has not been parsed correctly – if I have a character in the title that turns into an HTML entity, then it goes all pear-shaped.

Today I tracked down why (which will probably make a bunch of UKNOTters very happy). When my post gets sent to LJ, it has the special characters in the title. Take my last blog entry as an example:

“Therrre’s been a Murrrrrderrrrr”

Fine. Nothing wrong with that. Comes up in the RSS feed as:

 <title>&#8220;Therrre&#8217;s been a Murrrrrderrrrr&#8221;</title>

For those of you who aren’t technical, that’s how those special characters are embedded within the RSS feed. They’re parsed as HTML entities and converted by your browser to something pretty. Obviously this means that if I want to put an ampersand into my document, it has to be encoded as &amp;.

Problem is this – look what LJ’s RSS feed does:

 <title>&amp;#8220;Therrre&amp;#8217;s been a Murrrrrderrrrr&amp;#8221;</title>

Yup, its converted the ampersands into HTML entities. I’ve checked what I can – everything seems fine apart from LJ’s RSS generator. So, LJ, you’re broken. I don’t know why I expected anything different…

[Sidenote: Thanks to Joel for updating the planet link to my blog so quickly. It's all fixed on Planet now]

Wow.

On Saturday I was prepared. Not wanting to get caught out again, I got all my kit ready, ironed my uniform and got everything ready for my ambulance shift which started back up at 08hrs. I started pottering around the house and everything was going to plan until the pager went off. So I logged off, jumped in the car and headed up to base. As it turns out it was a dog rescue, which we completed quickly enough with the fire service before heading back to base. I headed back home and settled down for the afternoon to clean up the house a bit and watch the rugby. A great game, I was most surprised to be able to watch it all when the phone rang – red call to a gentleman with difficulty breathing. So I headed off across Caerphilly to find this poor gentleman in the later stages of heart failure, with COPD, multiple pulmonary embolisms – he was already very ill, and an illness in the family was not helping. A little confusion and once the crew arrived, a few things became clearer – this was actually a blue call – a scheduled ambulance pick up into hospital. However, it transpires that in the discussions between the doctor and the control room, it had been categorised as a red call – effectively a 999 emergency call. Given his condition, this wasn’t surprising and we were just saying goodbye to the crew when my phone rang.

I’d left my pager at home and this was Les, one of our team members who was coming with me on Sunday to a Scenes of Crime training course at Police HQ. As we were on the phone, he said to me “Get up to base quick then. Gwent police have just called.” So I headed back to the car, handed the shift over to Linda and headed up the A470 sharpish. Straight back to New Tredegar where we’d rescued the dog, this time we had an 11 year old girl with a broken leg. We turned up and once again the fire service were there. After a brief assist, we happily headed home for some food.

I was enjoying the rest of my night and determined to go to bed early when the phone rang. Red call to a patient complaining of chest pains in Penyrheol. We took ages to find it – if you’re anything to do with the layout of roads and names of roads, please think about the poor people trying to find houses in an emergency. Equally, folks, please put your house number clearly on the outside. Anyway, we headed in to find a middle aged chap gripping his chest and groaning with pain every time he breathed. He described the pain as a crushing, gripping pain that spread from his chest to his back and up into his jaw. We couldn’t get a pulse – his arms were so tense from the pain. Linda and I shared a glance and suddenly the chap stopped breathing. He pitched forwards and I threw my hands up to catch him, and as he hit my hands, he drew a breath and carried on. I was worried.

I called control – we had nothing en route to back us up. No RRVs in the area and there wasn’t anything available. I gave them an update and an enormous thanks to the controller for his efforts. He found us an ambulance and gave me an ETA of 30 minutes. He then found me a paramedic in an RRV who turned up very quickly. In the meantime, some more history came out – the gentleman had fallen twice that day, once on his back and once on his front. I considered that his pain was related to the injury for a moment, but even if it was, the pain spreading into his jaw was inconsistent with the injury he described, so we carried on assuming it was cardiac-related. When we finally got the RRV’s ECG out and got a 12-lead readout, his heart looked fine, though because of his pain, it was difficult to tell. A quick shot of morphine and his pain was history. We then had another readout which didn’t concern the paramedic – a good thing. We could finally talk to this chap properly and it transpired that the pain in his back was worst. The crew quickly turned up after that and they took him in to get checked out. Were we right? Well, tough call – the paramedic on the RRV acknowledged that the back and chest pain was most likely related to his injury, but his neck pain was inconsistent. It’s possible he’d had a cardiac incident as well.

We headed home and as I was getting into the house the phone rang again – head injury. Off we went, this time it was an elderly lady. She was on Wharfarin and had a nose bleed – a potentially dangerous condition for someone whose on drugs to stop the blood from clotting. We sat with her until the ambulance came to take her in. I then stood down from my shift and went home to get a much needed 3 hours’ sleep.

The course on Sunday was cracking – very valuable and while it didn’t teach us everything about scenes of crime (or as someone kept saying – signs of cream), it gave us a basic introduction to the concepts. Certainly useful when we come across cases where it’s too dangerous for a SOCO to get to the scene and we have to collect evidence on their behalf. I was home by 17hrs and I lay down for a nap at 18hrs, sleeping most of the way through the night.

Time for a break.

BT Openreach, the part of BT responsible for the exchanges and the physical copper that comes to your door, has an address matching system. You get a bronze, silver or gold match depending on whether BT Openreach already knows about the address (gold), whether Openreach doesn’t but it can find it in the Post Office database (silver) or not at all (bronze). Problem is that unless you have a gold match, you can’t book an engineer and since it’s a datacenter and there’s special site instructions for access and location, we want a match.

So, in goes the address for Redbus Sovereign House. Excellent – 3 Gold match addresses. We chose the top one and Simon and I stop for a second and blink. The address is <some ISP>, Floor 8, Telecity Redbus, Sovereign House, Marsh Wall, London. Problem with that is that Sovereign House only has 5 floors.

But it’s a gold match. So we booked it. Now we wait for the Engineer to call us when he arrives on site. “Er, hi, this order. Um, I can’t find the location listed…”