Today I was sent on a course to learn “Conflict Management”.  As part of their responsibility under health and safety legislation ‘Da Firm’ has decided that we all need to be trained in personal safety.

I was quite happy, as it is an eight hour day, and I was taken off a twelve hour shift in order to attend this course.  I have been to four of these courses in the last 10 years or so, so I wasn’t expecting any surprises.

The actual location of the course was in ‘Partnership house’ which is a Christian building opposite Central Control at Waterloo.  It was bloody freezing there as well, and the coffee they supplied was completely undrinkable…

…Luckily I had a can of Red Bull in my bag.

The course was run by a free-lancer for Maybo, he was ex-army, and ex-police, and a very good tutor – although I was a bit surprised when one of the first things that he said was that “This course is copyright Maybo”, it just seemed like a strange thing to say.

As expected, it was the usual mix of talking about how to assess and defuse potentially hazardous situations, coupled with some physical skills of how to escape from people trying to grab you.  When I first did a course like this, many, many years ago the skills were all rather more ‘hard’ and involved pushing people away – this current course was a lot more ‘soft’, which is more useful because the people who tend to grab us are ‘little old ladies’, so punching them in the face is vaguely discouraged.

Quite a fun little day, and I learnt a few new tricks that’ll come in handy when I’m wrestling people to the ground…

Tomorrow, I shall be trying to blog every hour in some strange attempt to mix “Extreme Blogging” with the episodic format of Television’s “24”.  This will either be fun, or really tedious.  There will even be pictures.