...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 was working on the Fast Response Unit so I was on my own and pretty much left to my own devices. I'd spent part of the night driving around looking for a job to do, but there wasn't much going on for us solo responders. I had a bit of a hunger on me that I thought a quick trip to Tescos would cure. The one advantage of working on the car is that you can sometimes get decent food.
So I had a drive down there, parked up and went shopping. Plenty of chocolate and other unhealthy foods (I said you *can* sometimes get decent food, but there is little point for me breaking the habit of a lifetime). I just managed to put my shopping bags of goodies in the car when the computer terminal rang.

"17 year old male, assaulted outside Tesco".

Brilliant. The call wasn't the high priority calls that FRUs are supposed to be 'saved' for, but as I was already on the scene it would have been churlish to complain. It turned out that Control had seen me sitting there, realised that they were out of ambulances and so decided to keep me 'on scene'.

The patient was sitting inside. He had a brand new hole in his forehead made by some form of weaponry and the Tesco staff had been taking care of him. A motherly manager was fussing over him, which I thought was nice of her as he wasn't a happy bunny. He was otherwise unhurt and while the cut was pretty big it wasn't anything too serious and it had already stopped bleeding.

"So", I asked him, "Who did this?"

"Don't want to talk about it", he replied.

"OK then, did you see what weapon they had?"

"Said I don't want to talk about it".

Great, another young man who wasn't interested in throwing out any information. My psychic powers were tingling - it was pretty obvious that he knew the people who had hit him, and he probably knew the reason *why* he had been attacked. I've mentioned it before but truly random attacks are pretty rare and while it is wrong, you can generally understand why most of the people we see get thumped. I looked at my watch, there was no way I'd be able to put up with this fool playing the 'silent gangster' role while waiting for an ambulance.

"OK, come one, I'm not supposed to but I'll take you to hospital in my car".

"Thanks", so while he was untalkative he was at least polite.

I let Control know what I was doing and, due to the lack of ambulances, they were quite happy I was bending the rules.

He sat quietly in my car while I ran him down to the hospital, my attempts at conversation were met with silence. While on one hand this is an easy patient to deal with, on the other it's nice to know what happened so as to better assess the injuries he received. He wasn't impressed that I was trying to talk to him. He wanted to go to hospital and get fixed and he wasn't interested in making my life any easier.

I asked him if he wanted the police involved and he refused, which is fine by me as it reduces the amount of paperwork that the police have to do. Unfortunately for him the police were there to meet him at the hospital, the Tesco staff had called the police on his behalf and had directed them to the hospital. I don't think that they got any additional information out of him.

Before I left him sulking in the waiting room I asked him one last thing, "When you find the people who hit you, don't go and beat them up. It only makes more work for me".

His reply was a sullen grunt.

I love teenagers.