For those that are interested – I’ve recovered from about a month of near terminal email failure.  So if you have emailed me in the past month or so – don’t be surprised if you suddenly get an email in your inbox.  The problem has now been fixed.

On 22nd of April at 23:59 and 45 seconds I had my last alcoholic drink for 1 year and a day.  It’s something I occasionally do – give up alcohol.  This will be the longest ‘fast’ so far.  The reasons are many and varied, but include…

• I’m getting fat.  With a beer belly.  This is easier to do than that thing called ‘exercise’.
• I have a bad memory – if I have two pints then I may as well write off any hope of remembering the night.
• Alcohol is a depressive – I don’t need any more help in unblancing my ‘bad brain chemistry’.  I have more reasons than ever before to be happy – there is no need to wreck it now.
• I’m always moaning about drunks – time to remove that bit of hypocrisy from my life.
• I’ve found myself having a drink after each shift – this is not good.  It might be alright for others, but experience tells me that for me this is a bad idea
• Bottles of soft drink and water are cheaper than beer.
• I have a bad memory…hold on…Didn’t I just…oh…yes…
• For those in the know – I’m aiming for some inhibitory gnosis.

Tomorrow I shall hopefully be having a little day out – I’ll let you know more on Thursday if I manage to wake myself up a 7am in time for the charabanc…

Apart from tomorrow I’m working pretty much continuously for the next fortnight.  My sense of humour may fail at some point during this period of time…

After two weeks off work, I am returning to work tonight on my favourite shift, 18:00–01:00.  I love this shift because it fits in best with my own internal body clock in addition you can get a fair number of ‘interesting’ assaults, drunks and bizarre occurrences.  Of course by saying this, I’ll end up doing nothing interesting at all.

With a bit of luck (and, yes, I do have my fingers crossed here) it will be the first shift with my new crewmate.  As with any new work partner it might take a little time to settle in with them, but it’s something that I’m looking forward to.

I’d like to also apologise for not posting much in an ambulance vein for the last couple of days – a bit of depression (some of it alcohol induced) coupled with an accidental deletion of my ‘potential blogging stories’ file has left me empty of inspiration.

And no, this apology isn’t because someone left a comment saying they weren’t coming back to this blog because they were bored with the non-ambulance stuff, when you read this blog you have to put up with the random breaks in transmission that shift-work and lack of inspiration causes.  Included in that is that I’d sometimes like to write about stuff that isn’t ambulance related.

Besides, if they are gone, they’ll never read this…

I am a bad, bad person for not blogging more over the last few days.  My only excuse would be that I was preparing for my talk.  And then after my talk I was recovering.

You see – after the presentation I got accosted by a stalker who forced me to drink several pints of obviously poisoned alcohol.  Alcohol has a bit of a bad effect on me and yesterday I just couldn’t face turning my computer on.  Because of this I was only able to wave at Dave Green – I hope he understands that the lure of ‘stalker’+’beer’ is one I simply cannot resist.

Concerning the last post…

The plan was to post that picture from the event, using the Wifi at the Apple store – then at one point during the talk where I ramble on about how to prove your blog is your own I could direct everyone with a laptop to have a look at the picture.

Unfortunately something went wrong so the post and picture were somehow both delayed by 24 hours.

You can download the Powerpoint presentation here, if you are so interested – I’d post my notes but they only really make sense to me (and then only just).

Like the other times I’ve talked in front of a lot of people, I think I started out a bit rough but gradually got better as the talk progressed.  I need a bit more practice talking to large groups of people in a non-“get out of the way, I have a patient to get to” fashion.

The other speakers were excellent, Annie Mole giving an interesting presentation about why you should blog, and exploding some of the myths around blogging.  Inkycircus talked about some of the issues of running an effective groupblog.  Unfortunately Tom Coates was ill, which was a bit of a disappointment for me, as I’d love to see one of his talks.

And thanks to Londonist for letting me blather on – you can read their account of the event online.