OK.

Time for something stupid...

I have a holiday due in a few weeks, from the 16th to the 29th of June. No work for two glorious weeks.

This makes me happy.

The idea is that I get to travel around the UK visiting places that I've never seen. But how do I avoid just going to places that are hiding in the recesses of my mind?

I get you folks to write my itinerary.

I've set up a wiki (an website that anyone can edit), and I'll leave it up to you folks to edit in some interesting places to go and/or people to meet.

So please, go to this website, and write down some interesting places for me to go. I believe that this is the first time someone has done something like this.

Consider it an open-source, public domain, user-generated holiday.

Or an experiment in being really silly.

I should have a new title added after my name. 'Professional waker-upper'.

Two calls in the space of one shift to people who are sleeping in a public place.

One person fell asleep in a magistrate's court, waiting for his friend to be finished in one of the courts. His friend must have been so excited not to receive a custodial sentence that he left his friend behind.

Smelling slightly of alcohol he'd bedded himself down and fell asleep. We were called by one of the security officers, no-one seemed too happy to shake him awake.

One application of slight pain from the nice ambulance man and the patient woke up, thanked me n his own language and walked off home.

The second patient was asleep on a bus, he'd had a bit more to drink and needed a bit more... ahem... stimulation to wake up.

No thanks from this patient, but at least he didn't make good his threat to punch me. And we didn't need to call the police on him either. A good result all round really.

It's strange that some people seem to think that you need an ambulance in order to wake someone up. I've even been called to nursing homes when one of their patients has been asleep at 3am in the morning.

In fact the whole shift was like that, fourteen jobs in twelve hours with only five of them travelling to hospital.

Ho-hum. Easy money I suppose.

Just time for a quick one (I'm working twelve hour shifts at the moment and am spending as much time as possible asleep).

I get a call to a stabbing in a park. Not as nasty a stabbing as they can be, but bad enough to have me sweating a little while chanting my mantra 'scoop and run, scoop and run'. I like to get people in this sort of position to hospital as quickly as I can, I'm not the gung-ho type to perform surgery in the back of my ambulance, and that is what this patient needed.

The job is going remarkably smoothly - a team leader on a FRU was already there and was of the same mind as me.

So, we are just doing the needful things before we can move when an officer from another complex turns up.

"Can I help?", he asks.

I let him know that we are going to be leaving soon as there is little that we can do for this patient besides get him to hospital sharpish. So no, thanks for the offer but we have things under control.

"I notice you haven't got epaulettes on", he says.

I'm cutting the patient's clothes off (to make sure he hasn't been stabbed anywhere more serious than where he has already been stabbed), so I throw the comment that, yes, I know - but the were in my car when it got nicked and I'm waiting for some more.

He mutters something, but to be honest I'm not hugely interested. I've put in memos, spoken to my officers and I'm still waiting, it's not my problem any more.

(Also I'm wearing boots that I bought in good faith so I could get back to work, but our office has lost the paperwork on them so I'm £60 out of pocket until they decide to pay me for them - I might threaten them with not turning up to work wearing 'personal' footwear - that might get a few cogs moving).

We get the patient to hospital, the patient should be fine.

Now, I'm not saying that proper uniform isn't important. Personally I think that crews who don't tuck their shirts into their trousers look awful, it doesn't give us a professional look. Likewise, epaulettes are important as they are the marker of our 'rank'. It's just that there are better times to bring this up with a crew than when we are dealing with someone who might die in the next few minutes. Especially when the officer in question doesn't know us at all.

I'm not the only one who gets pulled up for uniform while doing something a bit more important.

SCENE ONE

Two men of the same age in a sparsely decorated bedroom. One man (REYNOLDS) is an ambulanceman, the other (SPOTTY BLOKE) is a man suffering from Chickenpox.

REYNOLDS enters

REYNOLDS
Hello sir, can you tell me what the problem is?

SPOTTY BLOKE
I have Chickenpox.

REYNOLDS
(Slightly non-plussed): Yes, sir, why have you called an ambulance?

SPOTTY BLOKE
I have a pain in my chest. I went to the hospital yesterday and they said to take painkillers.

REYNOLDS
And what else did the hospital say?

SPOTTY BLOKE
Nothing.

REYNOLDS
Nothing? Surely they said something, they must have spoken to you.

SPOTTY BLOKE
They said I have Chickenpox.

REYNOLDS
See, that's something. So the pain is the same?

SPOTTY BLOKE
Yes - I want to go to hospital.

REYNOLDS
I don't think that they are going to do anything different from yesterday sir.

SPOTTY BLOKE
But I'm ill, my son has Chickenpox and it's not bothering him.

Reynolds is obviously biting his tongue.

SPOTTY BLOKE
I want them to do blood tests.

REYNOLDS
For Chickenpox?

SPOTTY BLOKE
Yes.

REYNOLDS
It won't do any good, they'll just give you more painkillers.

SPOTTY BLOKE
I don't care - I want to go to hospital.

REYNOLDS
(Worried about being sued for leaving someone at home)
Fine sir, your choice. The ambulance is outside, we'll take you the 800 yards to hospital. Did you have an ambulance turn up like us yesterday? With blue lights and sirens?

SPOTTY BLOKE
Yes.

REYNOLDS
(Wondering if someone at the hospital might sue him for bringing a potentially infectious patient to sit in the waiting room for a few hours)
Sigh...

SCENE TWO

REYNOLDS again, now with a WOMAN a year or two older than him. The WOMAN is coughing rather a lot. We join them as the initial patient assessment is nearing the end.

REYNOLDS
...So, you've had this cough for a few days now?

WOMAN
(nodding) COUGHCOUGHCOUGHCOUGH.

REYNOLDS
Would you mind putting your hand over your mouth please?

WOMAN
(The woman doesn't move) COUGHCOUGHCOUGHCOUGH.

REYNOLDS
Ah. No then. Never mind, it's been a while since I've had a chest infection, and I'm only in a *little* bit of trouble for being sick so much.

WOMAN
COUGHCOUGHCOUGHCOUGH.

REYNOLDS buries his head in his hands and wonders how long he has until retirement. The WOMAN spits on the floor of the ambulance.

---

(And yes, I know the formatting is a bit wonky for a proper script, but it can be a complete pain to format stuff for this blog, some of the dialogue on REYNOLDS part may be slightly made up. But not by much).

It's all the fault of Sony - they've turned me into a lawbreaker.

While I was America (nice place, shame about the government - although you may as well say the same thing about the UK) I spotted a demo model of the Sony Reader (PRS505). I'd been wanting to see what 'E-Ink' looked like so I had a bit of a play around with it and thought it was rather nice.

As I am a nerd and a shameful first adopter I managed to wrangle one into my grubby little hands.

It's really rather clever - the screen is easy to read, it's light and thin and it doesn't feel like you are reading things off the screen. You load the books onto it via your desktop/laptop system (and the software isn't Mac compatible, but there are workarounds).

So it came time to load some books onto it. First stop was the Sony Reader Ebook Store. It is from there you can pay for and download e-books. I quite fancied the Neal Stephenson 'Baroque Cycle'. I own them in 'dead tree' edition, but have never managed to read the whole three because the books are physically huge.

And then I hit a snag.

You see, you need a credit card that is registered in America to buy things from the store. Being a simple traveller from the UK I don't have such a thing. So my money is no good for them.

**Insert clever joke about current £/$ exchange rate here**

I want to give them my money. I give Audible my money for audio-books, I give iTunes my money for music downloads. But the rules of international marketing and the dumbness of Sony means that I'm not allowed to read their books.

What to do, what to do?

Well, I could scan the books in to my computer, perform OCR on them and put them on myself - but have you see the length of them? I could transcribe them myself, but then I may as well be reading them.

So instead I hit the bit-torrent sites and downloaded them.

I now have slightly wonky formatted copies of the books that I already own, books that I would have paid money for again for the ability to read them on my sexy new reader.

So lots of people have missed out on a sale.

Back in the day I used to illegally download music - now I have the ease of use of iTunes or eMusic, one day hopefully Amazon in the UK will offer music downloads. I'm happy to pay for these downloads because (a) Its the right thing to do and I'm no longer a skint student (b) It's just easier.

When video rentals for iTunes arrives on these shores I'll be using that, or a competitors service.

I like paying for my media.

I've downloaded books from Project Gutenberg and from Archive.org (including my own book), but I want to give real authors real money for the privilege of being able to read their books.

But Sony says I can't.

The counter argument is that I have no 'right' to format shift works that I already own - move, for instance, bought CD music into the MP3 format. Yes, if you've done this then you have broken the law and the record companies can sue you into bankrupcy. Allowing this 'format shift' is one of the key recommendations made by the Gowers report (even though the government is being slow to bring it into law).

Ethically I don't think I'm doing anything wrong, if I'm allowed to resell books that I've bought (which I am) then why can't I reformat them into another readable format for my own personal use.

But by making me jump through these hoops I'm reduced to illegality.

---

With no work until Thursday, and no stories in my 'big black book of interesting ambulance stuff' I'm stuck writing about other things. Oh well, normal service will be resumed soon.

So there I am, sitting on my computer at silly-o-clock in the morning.

Then I feel a shaking.

It's all part of my plan for being awake for my morning shifts. I come in from work at around 3pm, go to bed and wake up around 11pm. Then I stay awake until I head off to work at 6am. Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

Which means that I'm stretched out on the futon, typing away on a blogpost when I start vibrating. I consider twittering a joke about being in an earthquake but then just put it down to my body doing strange things. I reckon it's just that my laptop was sitting on my femoral pulse or some such.

But no - it's an earthquake.

My very first earthquake and I think it's my heart beating.

Makes a change, normally I'd sleep through such things.

Ergh. I shouldn't have drunk the wine last night. That and a too warm room has left me feeling rather grotty.

Never mind! I get to command the attention of a room full of people later today, maybe point out a few things. Who knows.

Yesterday I managed to speak to the Director General of the NHS workforce, the woman who is ultimately my boss. How could I let such an opportunity slip?

I told her that the reason that a lot of NHS staff are unhappy is because of having to chase targets, and that these targets are often clinically pointless. That because of resources being directed to hit these targets patient care is suffering and that, no matter how cynical we might be, ultimately we get annoyed when we can't give the care we would like to.

She appeared to pay attention and jotted a few things down in a notebook, although obviously I'm not hugely hopeful - she has her bosses to report to as well.

In about two hours I'll get to hear Nick Clegg talk about mental health. Perhaps I'll collar him and let him know the truth about the out of hours provision, or rather lack thereof...

Then I get my chance to present something which, contrary to tradition, starts with an insult rather than a joke. I'm not quite sure where to go after insulting everyone, but I've got two hours to work it out.

So far everyone I've met has been really nice and the Guardian are looking after me very well (as an aside, is it Guardian policy to only employ women who are lovely?) Last night during dinner I shared a table with someone who works in the cabinet office, a PR person, one of the bosses of the Guardian, someone who works with an advisory charity and Tim Campbell (and yes, I was the only person who didn't know who he was). Despite moving in these lofty circles I still found everyone to be very personable and had a nice chat with them over a very tasty dinner.

Right - time for me to get ready to hit some politicians and planners with the big stick of truth. That or stand up and make a prat of myself by not using words such as 'dynamic' or 'engage'.