When I wake up on a work day (it doesn't matter whether it's early or late), I get on station and figure out which truck I'm on; there's a screen in the mess room that shows the fleet number – my truck – beside mine and my crewmate's names and our call-sign for the shift.

I go to the key safe, use the appropriate code and take out the keys matching the fleet number (assuming that the keys don't belong to a truck still out on the road).

Then I go to the drugs room, using my ID card to gain entrance. Inside, I use a specially allocated smart key to gain access to the drugs lockers to take out my meds for the shift.

I then have to separately access another safe to get my morphine ampoules which I have to sign out and have witnessed.

How did we come to this? Having lived here for 22 years (full-time) and now signed up to work for the ambulance service, it’s a strange and unsettling thing to say that I haven’t felt this much of an outsider in the UK since there were bombs going off in the 80s and 90s.

It’s fascinating watching a cabinet of sociopaths coalesce like metastasis around this virulent malignancy of a man. 

I really do despair of the much-vaunted judgment of character of the English.

As anyone who knows the Deptford Croppy will happily/ruefully tell you, there are few more fond exponents of cawbogourery, paddywhackery and outrageously tenuous claims of Irishness for unlikely candidates from A to Z -- (Muhammad) Ali to Zorro -- than yours truly.

Indeed, as my put-upon flatmates would no doubt exhaustedly testify, this relentless Irishry can take its toll.

For those who like their ‘freude’ liberally leavened with ‘schaden’; having a ringside seat on the slo-mo implosion of English political life that is Brexit has surely got to be the equivalent of riding Space Mountain on mescaline while being enthusiastically pleasured by [insert name of favourite actor/porn star/neighbour about whom you fantasise, here].

So….It’s been a good long while since last there was a post from this very rusty guerrilla news agency. I apologise of course but I’m still hoping my reader(s) understand. Training has been intensity in ten cities and in the middle of that madness, the world kept turning and spinning in a kind of out-of-control gyre that Yeats wouldn’t have made much poetry out of if he was being completely honest….

Well…first year ambulance placement is over. It was a laff-riot shot through with all sorts of sadness, madness and tragedy. I know it was pretty much the same for all my cohorts; to varying degrees and intensities. In that time, we found ourselves front and centre in local and international news stories and major incidents.

The first tranche of placement – for me at least – passed in a whirlwind of baby delivery, a hit-and-run with HEMS (Helicopter Emergency Medical Service) on scene, a veritable plethora of DIBs (Difficulty in Breathing), a smattering of panic attacks and one sickle cell crisis that I think about every day.

There was lots more besides.

Being a first year Paramedic Science student sometimes has an air of make-believe about it. We dress proudly in uniform for skills classes but we are by and large untested. And sometimes – particularly now, just ahead of placement – the restlessness this generates is practically palpable.

Don’t get me wrong; the scenarios we play out in the skills labs mightn’t exactly be Shakespearean tragedies – they’re usually just ordinary human tragedies but they’re no less gripping for all that.

That eerie zone one enters

Where the slightest of miscalculations 

Will result in almost certain death; 

Or at least a bloody good maiming.

It’s not necessarily that time slows down. 

It’s only that the germane presents itself.

What a week it’s been; first we had the English High Court make an official nonsense of Theresa May’s ludricrous tautology ‘Brexit means Brexit’ on 3 November and then across the pond on the 9th, we had the unedifying prospect of a Trump presidency crystallise into crazy reality.
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