The Rusty Wire Service

    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. I also have to ensure that the numbers between the book and safe tally before closing the safe. So once I have my drugs, I go back to my truck and start to check it over. Engine, and all lights (incl. hazards and blues) on for a wal...

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. After all; braying, bumptious incoherence peppered with entitled Latin and Greek bon mots still trumps actual competence just like it did back in the Edwardian halcyon. The rest of Europe can only look on in exasperation as the UK continues to play a game of chicken with itself. This country’s ruling class embodies the Dunning Kruger effect. Time and tiring time again it is being proven that the so-called class who were born to lead are conspicuously short on anything coming within an ass’s roar of compet...

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. They might even reckon they could sleepwalk their way through our paramedic training modules on ‘Recognising Radicalisation’ after living with me for two years. Identity is a recurrent leitmotif here at the Rusty Wire Service and frankly, it never gets old. So what better time to revisit the theme than on the weekend of our annual Hibernalia? In fairness, much as I revel in the jubilant silliness of taking irrational pleasure in the (often exaggerated) fables of the land of my forbears, I’d die roaring before I’d allow myself to be called a nationalist. Even growing up during the Tro...

Guardian 2019 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]. Yes indeed, the omnishambolic clusterfuck of the bodypolitic here on Airstrip One continues to confound, exasperate and stupefy in seemingly equal measure. From an objective viewpoint, I’d probably find it genuinely hilarious if it wasn’t happening in a state where I live while also having profound ramifications for the country where most of my family are resident.   Still, I keep finding myself trying to look at the bigger picture and I guess that’s where the ferrous content of this whole sorry saga goes way beyond being irony. If we chose to ignore the grassroots reasons for a ‘Leave’ vote...

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…. So, what’s happened since last I put pen to paper? Well, nothing I hadn’t predicted in my darkest days. The coup continues. Brexit was never anything other than an attempt by the selfish right to take control of the sections of public life that hadn’t already been sweated and rendered down to private control. In that scenario, the human stories don’t matter. It doesn’t matter that I'm Irish and about to complete paramedic training and that my partner is French and my daughter is German. It doesn’t matter that I grew up experiencing my first bombing in Ireland at the...

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. But it's never about what the reporters say, or don't say, or just flat-out concoct; that's actually another thing that becomes apparent rather quickly even after only a few weeks on the road (especially as a former hack).  But aside from all that high-tension, high-stakes drama, there would also be numerous situations where we found ourselves dealing with the littlest of ‘little sick’ and wondering why, in the name of all that's holy, had we been called out while the  mobile data terminal ( MDT) was requesting crews to attend a stabbing or an RTC (Road traffic collision)? But if life gives you lemons...at least practice running a good set...