I sat down and re-assesed my options, talking to Sean. I felt as though I was still missing something and Sean was still happy with me doing somethign in addition to Mountain Rescue. I’ve always enjoyed the medical side of Mountain Rescue and I really missed dealing with patients as I used to in the First Responders. So, what could I do?

Enter St John Ambulance. I called national headquarters, based in Cardiff and was referred to Father Andrew, the Divisional Officer In Charge (DOIC) of Cardiff Central. After a long conversation with him, it sounded like I’d hit on the perfect unit – they perform mainly front-line ambulance duties and don’t have a cadet contingent which mean the unit concentrates on training and duties for their adult members.

The first night set the tone really – they’re mostly insane, much like Mountain Rescue. I passed them all the information I could about the training I had complete with Mountain Rescue. Things were looking great…and then a letter came through the door.

South Wales Police had started up its recruitment again. This caused a bit of a dilemma – leave St John and concentrate on the Police? Stop the recruitment process with the police? What to do?

I carried on with both (well, all three including Mountain Rescue) for a while, but this really wasn’t sustainable. Coupled with the fact that I had changed jobs and was considerably busier than I used to be, something had to change. So, after a long conversation with Sean, I decided to withdraw my application to South Wales Police for now. It’s something I’d still like to do, but I’m limited in how much time I have in life – I do like to sleep occasionally!

Last weekend, I passed the 7th course I’d taken in 5 weeks. It’s been a hectic month, but passing my PTA course now means that I can go out with St John Ambulance to do what’s called HDS duties (High Dependency Service) – these are thigns like Doctor’s urgents (when a patient needs to go to hospital urgently but isn’t life-threatening enough to call 999) and hospital transfers. I’m also one of our division’s two drivers currently – so looks like I’m going to be kept busy driving a lot.

On Thursday my uniform arrived – that’s right, look out for me wandering the streets of Cardiff in a natty green uniform. In fact, my first duty is this Saturday, when I’m joining two experienced members for my first HDS duty.

So, er, yeah, that’s where I am, that’s why I haven’t been blogging much of late. Work is taking me to London again this week which means I won’t (again) attend Mountain Rescue on Thursday. Look out for updates on the weekend from the HDS duty, as well as a whole bunch of rants and other stuff I’ve got queued up ready to post.

Tally ho!

Anyway, Sean and I have been planning a trip to Italy for a few months now and it’s almost here. Tomorrow afternoon, I leave work and drive to Cardiff to pick Sean up. The next time we’ll see the house, we’ll have drive through Belgium, Luxembourg, France, a bit of Germany, Switzerland and Italy.

I am, understandably, somewhat excited. Internet access has been sorted despite Vodafone being useless – thankfully, 3 are targetting users wanting some decent data rates at the moment, so I have a 3 SIM in my laptop’s built-in 3G card. It’s PAYG so I won’t come home to a £300 phone bill and it means that I can keep a record of the trip on my blog.

I’m just waiting for clothes to dry now and hoping the weather will last…

Update: Track my travels on Dopplr

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.

Well, OK, he’s lived here over the various University holidays over the past three years, but as of this Saturday, he’s finished his degree. He’s packing up the last of his things and throwing them in the back of his still-new-to-him car and bringing them here.

Am I excited? Am I fuck. I’m bouncing.

There is, however, the small logistical matter of where the hell we’re going to put his crap. Because folks, I have a lot of crap. The office has recently been semi-emptied – that is, we’ve gone through all of the tat in there, put up some shelves, filled the shelves with tat we can’t bear to throw out, thrown out shitloads of tat and shoved the rest in the corner or into the spare room. The other day, you know, that day. The Day Mal Got Married*. Well, he was staying in the spare room given that his bride to be was staying in their place. So, I had to reorganise and it turns out it’s not quite so much of a Tardis as I’ve been treating it.

So, I have a feeling that some general reorganising is going to have to be done in the house when he comes home. But that’s just logistics.

Right now, I’m just looking forward to spending evenings snuggling on the sofa watching Gray’s Anatomy. Or Casualty. Or the Bill. Or something.

* Oh God but this deserves a post of its own, just as soon as I’ve nicked some pictures to illustrate because I, like the idiot best man I was, did not take a single picture all night. Seriously.

I drove up to Aberystwyth tonight to take Sean back for his lecture tomorrow. I checked the MetOffice reports, but after a bit of a snow shower around 1700 this afternoon, the only thing reported was “icy roads” – not normally a problem anywhere other than my street, so off we went. No problems and driving back was fine…until I hit Storey Arms. Well, I didn’t hit it – I’d slowed down a bit by that point. I knew that this was the worst part of my journey and the fingers of white creeping into my lane from the snow told me that it was a little chilly outside. I’m glad I did slow down, because after a little wobble at Storey Arms when I found the black ice, I slowed down a bit more. I was wrong about one thing though.

All the way down from the Storey Arms to the Beacons Reservoir the road was icy. I was crawling along at around 10mph when I started the descent down towards the Nant Ddu Lodge – and I’m glad I was because halfway down the hill, I saw blue lights. Letting the engine slow me down, I saw a police car pulled into one side with a car opposite him, halfway up a lamppost. The car in question had obviously visited both hedges before trying to climb the lamppost, but failed, leaving itself at approx 30 degrees. To be fair to the driver, at under 10mph, I was finding it challenging to keep the car going where I wanted it.

Carrying on down the road, I checked traction at the first Merthyr Roundabout and found that it had returned – looks like the salt’s done its job, I though. I was wrong.

I had a brief wobble over one of the bridges which I’d slowed down for, and so I kept my speed slow as I headed through the Merthyr area and down the next stretch of the A470 to Abercynon. I didn’t so much wobble as become aware that I had very little traction on the next piece, so I let the car drift down to a sedate 20mph and saw another RTC on the opposite carriageway, with another police car in attendance. Keeping the speed low, myself and another car made it down to Abercynon. Now, with the bad weather recently, the mountain road from Nelson has been closed, so I headed down the A470 towards Caerphilly. Keeping a good few hundred meters behind the car in front, we crossed the ice-covered viaduct at Abercynon and carried on towards Pontypridd – I was expecting the Trallwng corner to be bad – it’s an elevated section, banked and a very sharp corner. I was only doing 20mph so had plenty of time to see the police car with his lights on in the opposite carriageway waiting for the RTC and waving at me – presumably because I wasn’t driving like a loon.

The other car and I carried on down the A470 at a gentle pace of about 35mph, slowing down for the odd bridge - unlike the idiot in the white van that shot past us like we were stood still, wobbled precariously as he found the ice on the bridge up ahead and, having stabilised himself, carried on at a speed that was ridiculously dangerous for everyone on the road.

Whoever said you don’t need crampons in South Wales? Never mind the mountain, I almost whipped them out to get back to the house tonight. The car is at the bottom of the hill – I could see the ice shining like glass on the road as I approached and parked the car neatly out of the way. The walk up was interesting – going up a slope with little or no traction whilst hanging on to the fence must have been amusing to the cat who was sat watching me.

So, home safe. To bed for now, to see what joy tomorrow’s weather brings. I’ll be thinking of the lads and lasses that make up the three main emergency services who are out in the cold tonight as I cuddle up in my warm bed.

So when I was sat in the office today and one of the managers walked in and said “I’ve got flowers for you Aled.” my initial thoughts were “Yeah, right, whatever.” Failing miserably to spot the punchline I looked up as he put the flowers next to me and handed me the card – it had my name on it. WTF?

Suspecting I knew who’d sent them, I opened the card to find a note from Sean. I won’t regurgitate the whole thing here, but suffice to say it was sweet and thoughtful and I rapidly turned purple as everyone watched. The flowers are beautiful, the thought and emotion behind it far more so. I think that I’m a very lucky man.

Of course, me being a geek, my first thought was “I should take a picture of this so I can blog it…”

Of course, being away over the weekend and spent much of the end of last week tied up in the evenings, so when I came home tonight, I had a stack of things to watch on TV, notably two episodes of the Bill. It’s quite interesting to watch – a double episode covering an 8 year old girl who goes missing. They eventually find her body and so far, the killer looks like it might be a 10 year old boy. What’s really interesting from my perspective, quite apart from the storyline, is watching the initial process of someone being reported missing. Eventually there’s a big search in an area of undergrowth – very reminiscent of what we do when we search for a missing person. Eventually they find a body and the programme then follows on where we stop – the investigation and arrest. It’s quite interesting – one of the areas of police work I’m most interested in is search management and dealing with missing persons, so with my application to the police progressing, I do hope at some point that I get to be involved in this kind of work.

Anyway, back to the Bill…

Figuring that time was running out for Sean and I to have a break this year, I booked some time off (just a few days) and we packed the car and left. We had a vague plan – some friends in Betws Y Coed and my sister on Anglesey, but beyond that we could do anything. We packed a tent and everything we’d need just to pitch up for a few nights, filled the car up with diesel and headed off, L-plates stuck on the car and Sean firmly behind the wheel (and me in the passenger seat feeling very nervous).

We started off well with Sean driving quite well. However, it rapidly became apparent that we had to get to Sean’s mother faster than he could reasonably be expected to drive so we swapped quickly and set off up to Llangorse where she was attending a singing camp. Glorious sunshine greeted us as we arrived at what was in fact a very waterlogged campsite but the sunshine boded well for our trip. Toddling off up towards Brecon we hit the A470 and after stopping for tea and scones at Builth Wells, Sean drove us up to Betws Y Coed where we stopped overnight. Over dinner we made our plans for the morrow and the plan we’d decided on was something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time – Crib Goch. However, it wasn’t to be. As part of The Plan, I decided that a weather report was in order. The MetOffice however scuppered our plans (well, I suppose they didn’t themselves…) with a report of 55mph gusts on “exposed ridges”. I think Crib Goch qualifies as that. So we changed our plans and headed into Betws Y Coed instead. It turned into quite a nice day and we ended up taking a drive up through Pen Y Pass and down into Llanberis. A quiet bite at the famous Pete’s Eats and we headed back up to Pen Y Pass where I took the two pictures above. The top one is of Crib Goch from the back of Pen Y Pass. The bottom one is of the weather report as it was at the entrance to the cafe. Standing there taking the first photograph, I have to admit, I was glad we hadn’t attempted the ridge – I had to use a nearby wall to steady my hands in the wind and it would have been significantly stronger at the top.

After a few days around Betws, we headed up to see my sister. It was good to see the kids again, although my sister ended up feeling quite ill, so we spent some time around the house. Despite the lack of walking, Sean and I had a great time. We spent the entire time with limited internet access – at some points with limited access to any kind of communications at all. I barely fired up my computer – no work for any of the organisations I work with. Absolute bliss.

We drove home today – well, Sean drove a fair bit of it. He’s getting pretty good, though he’ll need some more practice before he goes for his test. I’m relaxed, unwound and ready to get back to work tomorrow. What more can you ask?

After doing my Ambulance shift on Saturday, I headed up to Aberystwyth. Sean and I headed out to a Greek restaurant in town, where I think I surprised the waitress by actually knowing what I was ordering and pronouncing it fairly accurately too. It was a cracking meal and as Sean and I were relaxing in his room later on, the pager went off for the first time in a while. This one was for a search in Penarth for a missing elderly gentleman. Weighing up the options, I decided to not attend – it would be a 100-mile journey to base, 2 hours minimum. Not really worth it – a decision that’s becoming harder to make with rising fuel prices, since I have to pay for my own diesel for going to callouts.

The search continued into the early hours when it was stood down – the team had an ex on Sunday which was supposed to go ahead until the pager went off again at 1000 – a continuation of the previous nights’ callout. Whilst my colleagues were scouring scrubland in South Wales, I was eating ice cream and relaxing on the beach in Mid Wales (sorry guys!). The afternoon peace was broken by another pager message – this time for an area call in the waterfalls which finished fairly quickly. With the afternoon dying away, the search was finally stood down and I enjoyed a peaceful night.

Until last night when, as I was pulling away from Tesco’s, the pager went off. I headed up to base, vaguely concerned about my frozen pizza in the boot. Once there, I found that we had a sighting of a flare in or around the Ystradfellte Reservoir and so we headed up to Storey Arms to meet the Brecon team. With people approaching the valley from all directions, it wasn’t long before we stumbled across some people who had been setting off flares for no good reason and should have known better. I can’t go into detail, but suffice to say, they’re probably not having a good day today.

As I was about to pull out of the layby after packing up, the pager went off again, this time for a possible downed hanglider north of Cardiff. By the time I got to base, we’d been stood down since no actual evidence of the crash had been found. We packed up and headed home where, at 2300, I finally managed to cook my now-deformed and defrosted pizza. I finally collapsed into bed around 0100 and fell deep asleep…

…until about 0145 when the pager woke me – search for a misper in Porth. With feet of lead, I dragged my reluctant self downstairs and headed off to base again. Not much to say about this one, there wasn’t a huge amount of information, it was a horrendously shitty area to search and he was found outside of our search area. By the time I’d packed up the vehicle in base and reached home it was 0600 and I managed a few hours’ sleep before I had to get up for work.

I just hope that this isn’t the trend for the week.

Technorati Tags: callout