For those that are interested, some feedback on how Da Book is doing.

Perhaps vindication of the whole Creative Commons thing?

Here is the clip of me on Sky News.

The reason behind me looking so laid back is that this particular body posture helps me to relax.  All my stress is in my neck and shoulders, so if I sit forward like most people on the telly then I would tend to freeze up.

Not bad for someone with less than four minutes TV experience.

Due to the timespan of getting me on there, it was kind of obvious that no-one had really read the book, which explains the vague questions that were asked of me.

I’m impressed by the presenter, he not only presents but makes production decisions when the video is running and checks his emails.

(He gets the same spam as myself).

And yes…I was wearing makeup.

With the exception of Midweek on Radio Four on the 20th of September, I think that’s the end of the publicity machine.  It’s been a bloody good laugh.

From tomorrow I’m on a training course, sitting in a classroom for a couple of hours is Hell for myself.

But other things are making me happy.

I've been speaking to a young lady today, looks like I'l be on Sky News in the UK this Saturday at around 11am. Live...

I'm thinking of adding a line to my CV, "Will do TV, Radio, Print, Podcasts, or anything else for a bit of attention".

...I'm in The Guardian today, apparently a big piece that I haven't seen yet as I'm still lounging around in bed...

I've got the hump for reasons that I don't want to go into here - still, there is the light at the end of the tunnel that I have to look forward to. The previous sentence will only make sense to a couple of people.

Some injuries are like buses, you don't see any for ages and then two come along at once.

We were called to a young man with a cut foot. The trail of blood led up the garden path up to a small pool of the same blood underneath a rather annoyed young man. While walking in the street he had stepped on a broken bottle, the glass had sliced through the sole of his trainer and managed a fairly nasty cut to the sole of the foot. It was a simple job to wrap his foot in a bandage and then stare in awe at the lump of glass poking through the trainer. He was a nice enough lad who hopped to the ambulance, and who's friend's mum had already put on a pretty good dressing. He just needed an x-ray to exclude any glass being left in the wound and a couple of stitches.

Our last job was also a foot cut on some glass, this time it was a fifteen year old girl who lives in a pub, she'd been barefoot, and as is typical with the pubs around our way, there had been a nice sliver of glass on the floor. Cue much screaming and a rather huge amount of blood. Feet tend to bleed a lot, partly because there are plenty of blood vessels in them and partly because gravity tends to make the stuff leak out of you. I'd give the people in the pub a medal though, not only had they tried using a towel to stop the bleeding, but they'd also laid her on the floor and lifted her foot above her head. If only all out patients had such sense.
She still had the sliver of glass in her foot and while we aren't supposed to touch such 'foreign objects', I believe that have enough minor injuries experience to pull it out and better control the bleeding with pressure. It's a bit nasty to put pressure on a wound when there is a two inch lump of glass in it. Needless to say the patient managed to leak the red stuff all over the floor of the ambulance and my crewmate looked as if she had performed surgery on the patient. The bleeding was controlled, the patient was taken to hospital and everyone was happy.

A question now : In 'my day' working in A&E, we'd try to find an example of the glass that the patient had been injured with, then x-ray the wound *and* the glass. The reasoning behind this is that glass shows up on x-rays in different ways depending on the type of glass. If the example glass was invisible on the x-ray then we'd take more care to examine and wash out the wound, while if the example glass was easily visible then we could be more sure that there was none left in the wound. Do hospitals still do this, as the nurse in the local A&E looked a bit befuddled when I told her about this trick? (Although to be fair she was under some strain as the department was very busy).

My final glass story happened the night before last. We were called to a 'collapse behind locked doors', the relatives of a woman in her sixties had called us because they could see the woman laying on the sofa in her house but she wasn't answering the door or telephone. We arrived and the door was well locked - there was a deadbolt as well as the normal Yale, so neither I, not my martial arts master/built like a brick outhouse of a crewmate could kick the door down. At the relatives request I smashed the bedroom window and, after some backbreaking limbo work, climbed in.
Unfortunately the patient was deceased, it's never a nice thing to try an explain to relatives that their loved one is dead and that there is nothing we can do to help. I tried to explain that the patient looked very peaceful and that she had probably passed away in her sleep. We waited for the police and left them to look after the family - I had to have a quick run back to the hospital so I could wash the blood off the brand new cut I'd given myself on my hand. A minor injury that needs no treatment, and if it meant that the relatives thought we did all we could, then perhaps worth it.

Although I have spent the last two shifts picking glass dust out of my hair/clothes/boots.

I am now listening to 'Out Of The Blue' by E.L.O in order to cheer myself up. No posting on Tuesday as I'm out at 7:45am to do about seven regional radio programmes before sadly heading off to work.

I’ve mentioned it before, but I think that writing about it again would be worthwhile.

Blood, Sweat and Tea is (probably) the first book by a major European publisher to release a book under a Creative Commons license.  It has been released under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. which means that you can…

…use copyright material in specific ways without affecting the author's overall copyright in the work.

Under the terms of this book's licence, you are free to make copies of all or part of this work for your own personal use and for other non-commercial use. You may annotate or edit the work in any way, and republish it online in any format, providing any annotated and edited version includes a link back to the source material at http://www.fridaybooks.co.uk/bst

You may also make derivative works (Flash animations, videos, images etc, etc) based on this text for online, non-commercial use only.

Any annotated, edited or derivative version must be made available under the same Creative Commons licence as the original material.

As a wiser man than I has said, “My problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity”.  It is also because this website is licensed under the same scheme and to change it now that a large amount of it is in a physical book seems like an unethical thing to do.  I love Creative Commons, it’s a great way of finding new music, writing and other art.  Sure – it’s a bit of a gamble, but I honestly believe that this brave step by my publishers is the best thing for this book.

I’ve got to admit that it was nerve-wracking in asking my publishers about this and I cannot commend them enough for listening to, and understanding, the thoughts behind Creative Commons.

So you can go to The Friday Project page and download the *whole* book in a variety of formats.  You can then fiddle around with it and do whatever you like to it then upload it back to The Friday Project just so long as you don’t try to sell it. 

Fun, yes?

I’m hoping, and it’s a bit of an ego thing here to be honest, that it might shake up publishing a bit in this country and provide a blast across the bows of those who would restrict what you can do with media that you ‘own’.

(You do realise that in the UK it is illegal to rip a CD to your iPod, even if it is for personal use?).

Lets see how things go…

Lets see…

Monday

08:05 Picked up by cab from my house (probably in a state of unconsciousness).

10:00 Live interview with BBC Radio Derbyshire.

10:30 Live interview with BBC Radio Jersey.

11:00 Interview with The Weekly News.

12:00 Interview with Ambulance Today.

13:30 Interview with BBC Radio Wiltshire.

14:20 Interview with Simon Mayo on Radio 5 Live.

15:20 Visit Apple store in Regent Street for new goodies for my Macbook

 

Tuesday

10:00 Pickup for Interview with The Guardian.

18:30 Phone interview with REM FM Spanish Radio.

 

Wednesday

18:00 Back to serving the people of East London.

 

The Devil makes work for idle hands…

I should be doing an interview on Talksport radio later this evening.  Then tomorrow I start at around 8am do a load of regional radio programmes from a studio in London, then get interviewed by the Guardian and The Weekly News and finally have a drink and give some quotes to an Ambulance magazine.  Then on Tuesday I do a phone in with a Spanish radio station ad something else that I can’t remember but is written down on my Mac – which is in my bedroom and I’m quite comfortable sitting here.

All a bit busy, all a bit fun and I’m glad that Rachael from the PR firm has it all organised for me.

I mention this in one big burst because of something I’ve been thinking about from before my holiday – that this ‘ambulance blog’ has been a bit short on ambulance posts for quite a while.  I feel the need to get back to basics as it were.  The problem that I have is that if I’m not working (for example taking two weeks leave for a holiday in the sun and a book launch) then I’m not getting much material and the reserves of material that I’ve built up are close to running dry.

Luckily I’m back to work on Wednesday or Thursday (Mac in other room again) so there should be plenty of material.  If people discover this blog from the book/radio/TV they’d be a bit disappointed at the moment.  So I’m going to make an effort to post every day, I feel that, for someone who is supposedly a writer, I haven’t actually been *writing* enough.

Time for that to change.

UPDATE: I've just come from the Talksport studio having recorded my bit for between 02:00 and 06:00 tonight/tomorrow morning. It was good fun, the host was a superb interviewer and I think it's my best interview yet. If you are in the UK this wiki page tells you how to listen to it.

Apparently there is a new book out today - you may have heard of it.

I hope you enjoy it.

(And if you ordered it from an internet shop, you may have received it already).