There was no blogpost yesterday as I was doing a five hour round trip drive to the other side of London in order to drop off the baby pigeons.

The Wildlife Centre had some really lovely staff and they assured me that the pigeons would be well looked after, once they had learned to fly they would join the flock of three hundred other rescued pigeons that lives in the area and that they feed regularly.

So a really nice result even if the journey was extended somewhat by the failure of my sat-nav at a particularly crucial point...

At least I can now sleep knowing that they are safe and that they won't end up killed to death because we don't know how to look after them.

And a big thanks for everyone who gave advice, it was very much appreciated.

Ok, so I'm a soft git sometimes.

We have had some pigeons nesting the stock area of the ambulance bay for a while - a few days ago we noticed that there were some pigeon chicks there as well. Somehow they have managed to get quite large without us noticing.

Their parents had built their nest of sh*t in a cardboard box containing (ironies of ironies) the infection control suits.

Obviously we can't have pigeons nesting in our stock area as, no matter now much I like them, they spread diseases. Phone calls were made and exterminators were called.

I have a mate who is an pest control worker, and I know exactly what would happen to the babies. So I've snatched them up and brought them home. More specifically home to my mum* who'll be able to look after them during the day. I've taken on the cat**, who is currently sulking behind the futon in my flat.

However, we have no experience in dealing with pigeons, or birds of any sort. The websites and forums have let us know what, and how, to feed them, although I don't have any experience on the physical skills needed to actually carry this out. The pigeons are a bit older than they are in that photograph.

The thing is, I don't think that the RSPCA care much for pigeons - as they are considered 'vermin', I don't think that they are allowed to look after them (and their 24 hour advice line is unhelpful in this regard).

So really, what I need to know is how to look after them until they can fly away and be wild (I'd rather not keep them, but if that is the only option then I've plenty of room in my garden to build a pigeon home... thingy...), or if there is anyone out there willing to take them off my hands.

I think that this might be related to my reading about pigeons saving lives in the two world wars when I visited Bletchley Park.

So... erm... daft soft git asking for advice here folks.

*She who used to do physical therapy on our pet rats after they had strokes.

**Yes, that cat dear twitter followers...

UPDATE: Thanks to commentator 'mc1rvariant' I got in contact with the London Wild Care Trust who will take them for me - excellent, and thanks to everyone who sent me advice. It was all very, very much appreciated.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith is to unveil plans to shock young people who carry knives into a greater awareness of the impact of stabbing on victims.
Her proposals include visits to hospitals where people are being treated for knife wounds.

...Because, if you'd just been stabbed there is nothing more you would like to see than a gangster (possibly from the same gang who stabbed you) standing over your bed.

The thought that it will 'shock' young people into not running around stabbing each other is incredibly misguided. The reason people run around stabbing each other is because they are in gangs.

People are in gangs because of some well understood reasons, poverty and jealousy are the main things. We've always have poverty and we've always had gangs, it's just a lot more reported on these days.

A desire to call something 'theirs' is another reason why people get into gangs, to carve out a bit of the world that is theirs.

Look at the explosive popularity of Facebook and you see people separating into tribes.

With no external threats to safety these gangs turn on each other - Nothing unites Britain at the moment and so internal strife rises.

Gang members see the rich on TV all the time, the footballers, the actors, the politicians and they want what they have - but now the problem is that they don't want to work for it, TV like Big Brother has led to children, when asked what they want to be to answer "famous".

It might seem simplistic, but working around gangs and the things that they do, going into the sink estates on a daily basis, you get a feel for what the causes are. Everyone wants to be special, everyone wants to 'belong, and because they aren't special, or because they feel alienated, some people turn to tribalism and crime.

I was talking to a police officer about a particularly nasty piece of work the other day, he couldn't understand why some people in poverty turn to crime while the majority of people don't. And if he doesn't know, I'm damn sure the politicians don't either.

Young people today are invulnerable, they have never been disciplined effectively so they think that nothing can touch them. When I see the police arresting someone, all I can hear is the suspect shouting, "You can't arrest me!". The response to a teacher disciplining a pupil is almost always, "I know my rights". No-one has ever told these children "No". Parents don't chastise their children when they misbehave in the supermarket, so why would they discipline them for other things at home.

We are reaping what we have sowed in becoming a more permissive society in the 70's, 80's and 90's. You have to ask yourself if the cost to society for our permissiveness is too much.

That's what you have to treat, not the symptom, the knives, but the causes. You don't treat meningitis by trying to get rid of the rash, you treat it by getting rid of the infection.

But of course, that isn't an easy and quick fix, and it goes a lot deeper than the politicians would like to admit.

Look at the perpetrators and victims of knife killings, most of them are black youngsters - is this a coincidence? By saying that people can be 'shocked' out of carrying a knife they must be saying that black people don't normally think of their victims and this is how to 'uplift' them into changing. This, of course, is utter drivel.

Human beings have been killing each other for years, why should we suddenly stop? Have our brains evolved overnight to find killing abhorrent? I would suggest not, we are no different than we were 1000 years ago, or even 70 years ago.

But of course, politics is all about 'quick fixes', and I foresee new and 'improved' laws to deal with this surge in knife crimes. It won't fix anything and the crimes will eventually fall out of the media's gaze and turn to something else. The killings will go on, but less people will be interested and it will fade, once more, into the background.

Until then I'm guessing that we will have to endure more rapid and ill thought out legislation, and no increase in the infrastructure to enforce it.

Normal service will be resumed.

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Please excuse this post, it's a stream of consciousness thing and I really should have tidied it up, and had some sort of point, before posting it. Oh, and has anyone ever noticed how short the paragraphs are on the BBC News website?

Over on Mental Kipple I thought up some ideas for iPhone applications that I'd like to see.

The one most relevant to people who read this ambulance blog is #10

10) A copy of the BNF for offline reading, and not for £100+ please.

And what should I find on release but Epocrates Rx, a free application that does much the same as the BNF (British National Formulary, a list of all the drugs in circulation) but will also help me out when I come across pills in unmarked boxes and makes it easy to look up potential drug interactions.

Trust me when I say that it is infuriating to ask a patient what medications they take and they don't know and instead hand me a plastic box with half a dozen different pills in it.

It can be especially dangerous when we want to give them drugs of our own but have to be careful about it interacting with the patient's own medicine.

Really rather quite handy and quick to look at when I don't have my BNF to hand. The only problem is that it is American software and they have some different drug names that us Brits, but it is good for some things and is definitely worth what I paid for it.

I still want #2 though,

2) An Augmented Reality Game, perhaps crossed with social software overtones - consider if you will a game that is location based to where you *really* are. Using the location services in the phone (either original iPhone, or the AGPS of the 3G iPhone)

Anyone writing one want a story consultant? Or have we enough coders here who could group together to write such a thing under my benign dictatorship...?

A hospital has admitted clamping ambulances for parking infringements and charging £50 for their release.
Security staff at King's College Hospital, south London, are clamping the non-emergency ambulances for spending too long in drop-off bays.

These ambulances are privately run ambulances who took up the contracts for patient transport. This is something that the LAS used to do in London, but then with the sneaking privatisation of the NHS the private companies started to do things cheaper and so the LAS lost a lot of these contracts.

They have, as far as I know, no exemptions to where they can park (unlike us proper emergency ambulances).

I'm not quite sure how "They clamp ambulances parked for more than an hour "to allow other vehicles into the area," works though, surely if they are clamped then they are still blocking the area?

I don't know, I'm an ambulance driver, not an ambulance parker. And if you've ever seen me park, that much is pretty obvious.

Kal has wetted my eyes. Bloody swine, he knows I'm soft for the old ones.

A woman has said she was left in agony when an ambulance took three hours to respond to a 999 call after a fall.
A spokesperson for East Midlands Ambulance Service (EMAS) said: "We don't have sufficient time to look into the detail to respond to this."
"EMAS is a 24/7 service. We answer 500,000 emergency calls per annum and that's our priority."

(My emphasis)

Wow...

I never thought I'd hear an ambulance service say this. I guess that the person on the other end of the phone to the reporter was having a really bad day.

I wonder if this means I can get away with telling a patient that, "I don't have time to deal with your cut finger".

(My back of a fag packet numbers for London is that we have over 1.2 million calls a year, I'm sure the official figures are out there someone but I can't be bothered to look them up. I'm working in a few hours and yes, I know we have more ambulances than EMAS).

From the wonderful XKCD

Very unsatisfied today - mostly because I tried to get an iPhone 3G. The rest need not be said.

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With regard to the 'Warranted' post - We decided not to tell the police, after all they almost certainly have his address and will make an appointment to arrest him in the future (I learnt this from reading police blogs). He wasn't a threat to anyone apart from himself and in his distressed frame of mind (and fear of the police) it wouldn't have done his health any good to have the police hovering over him.

We did however let the nurse who took over care for him know, she needed to know as it could impact his further care.

---

I'm now going to potentially identify someone, not a patient obviously, but there is a reason behind this.

We were sent to a car crash on the A406 yesterday between Ilford and Barking, the traffic was moving exceptionally slowly due to the accident, so we had to squeeze through the lanes of traffic. As we travelled on blue lights and sirens the traffic parted before us like the red sea.

Which is why I was fuming when my crewmate told me that we were being followed.

Some [expletive deleted] in his car was tailgating us through the jam, keeping close to our behind he was jumping the queue that everyone else had been sitting in.

Now, ethics aside, this is incredibly dangerous - I often have to brake hard and he could have gone into the back of me, so I had to slow down the speed I was driving. This sort of behaviour has caused more than one accident when the ambulance driver has had to hit the brakes because, for example, a dog has run out into the road.

My crewmate went into the back of the ambulance and got his license plate number...

We reached the accident and dealt with the patient and while my crewmate was taking the patient's details I had a little chat with one of the police officers there. I explained what had happened, and he took the driver's license plate number.

"Right", he said, "I'll give him a call in the morning..."

It's an offence to impede the progress of an emergency vehicle, something this driver was doing even though he was behind me - hopefully he'll be charged with this as I believe it is a £500 fine. That'll teach the [expletive deleted] a lesson.

I mention where the accident took place so that if anyone in the queue was passed by this driver they can also have the similar warm glow that we had in setting the police on him.

Ambulance 'loses way' to hospital
Ambulance drivers are to get additional training after a vehicle got lost as it was taking a woman to hospital, who later died.In a statement East Midlands Ambulance Service (EMAS) said: "During the journey... the ambulance satellite navigation system failed and the driver, who usually operates in the Skegness area, took a wrong turn.
"This was realised and the crew member in the rear of the vehicle, who was familiar with the area, was able to direct the driver back on course.

I rely on the Sat-nav system on my ambulance - not so much if I'm working in my area, but if I'm elsewhere in London then I'm like a fish out of water.

Strange hospitals are the worst as I keep circling the area trying to find the A&E department.

If I do a transfer to a hospital outside of East London, there is then a big chance that I'll get another job in the area. I don't have 'the knowledge' so end up following the sat-nav or relying on one of our mapbooks.

This is a tragedy, but despite this it is a bit of a non-story in my opinion, someone from outside of the area took a wrong turn, it was corrected and they found the hospital. That the father of the patient reached the hospital 15 minutes earlier isn't unusual - I'm often beaten to hospital by relatives 'following' in the car, partly because we do various things before we leave the scene and partly because I don't drive like a loon with a patient in the back. Ambulances have different handling to cars and so we'll often drive slower.

If someone could tell me how 'better trained' can be implemented in order to make sure that when driving in an unusual area with a failed navigation system the driver never takes a wrong turn I'm sure every service in the country would be grateful.

And yes, I've taken a wrong turn or two myself and had to rely on the experience and knowledge of my partner to help me out, and I've done the same for people who have worked with me. It's why a good ambulance crew is a team.

And not being able to find a place can be one of the worse things that happens to you - as this example from the archives shows.

I got a job, '14 month child, floppy and lifeless'.
The address was given as 'Flat 1, Rose house, Starling road'.
I sped up and down the road. I spotted some of the names of the flats in tiny writing, on little blue plaques many of them pointing away from the road. My pulse started to rise. It had taken me four minutes to reach the area, but how much longer would it take me to locate the potentially very sick child?
I found 'Lilac House', 'Lily House' and 'Tulip House', but I couldn't find 'Rose House'.
Now I was starting to panic.

I don't know where I'm going with this, or even what site I should post this on - perhaps I'll just cross-post it to everything.

Once upon a time I was a clever bastard. I used to devour computer languages, I used to write 6502 machine code, in Hex for burning straight onto EPROMs. I used to learn things every day, I devoured books. I used to build computers and fix them. I used to solder little electronic gizmos together - 555 chips and LEDs, all in bare feet so I could hold the board still with my toes.

But last night I was trying to understand 'regular expressions', something that I should have found really easy. But I sat there and scrolled backwards and forwards and it just didn't sink into my brain.

It's not the first time I've noticed this, I sit and read and reread a bit of text a couple of times before it sinks in. I try to remember something and it just doesn't work. I try and write a blogpost and the words stop flowing.

I've a sneaking feeling it's to do with my lifestyle at the moment. I've heard it said that learning computer programming will alter the way that you think but I think that my earlier life has slipped away from me.

It might be a result of rotating shiftwork slowly eating away at my brain, it might just be my age - but I'm hating it.

The other thing that it might be is that in my day to day work I don't need to use my brain anymore. I turn up to a patient and can tell what is wrong with them within a minute, the lack of any 'serious' cases has meant that I go from job to job picking up people with very little wrong with them (or the usual suspect illnesses like angina, or COPD), doing some vital signs and then writing the same paperwork. I drop them off at the hospital and repeat it all over again - the only thinking that I have to do is in trying to work out how to get some food inside me.

When I started the job every call was a problem to be solved, but now I think I've reached the stage where I don't need to think about how to get the trapped woman with a broken leg out from under her bed, I don't need to consider how I break bad news to someone, it all just comes subconsciously to me.

I guess I'm just not stretched by my work anymore, even though I don't know what patient I'm going to go to next it's all just become a bit 'samey'.

Because I'm not thinking in work, my brain isn't getting any exercise. Because I work rotating shifts I can't go to night school to start learning again, because I work twelve hour shifts it is incredibly hard to motivate myself to learn on my own.

I need a kick up the arse. I need something that will stretch me, motivate me and force me to do some learning.

I need to get out of shiftwork - but I can't do a fixed rota in the ambulance service because I just couldn't live on the cut in wages that I'd have to take.

I'm not sure what else to do, and this is part of the reason for this post - I love to hear what other people think. This is a request for advice, a request for things that I can do to get my brain working again because I hate this slow slide from how my brain used to work into a dullness.

I need to get motivated again.

I have some books on programming in modern languages - maybe I should hit the Python one, try and force myself into thinking again.

C9

Drunk, but pleasant Lithy - chatting up the copper, sudden decrease in liking him after hearing about his repeated drunk driving convictions

It's funny how your impression of people can change from one moment to the next.

We were sent to usual job of 'Man hit over the head with a glass, cut to head' - we were directed to the rear of a chain pub. Standing there were two men, both worse the wear for drink.

The police arrived just behind us, and a female police officer got out to take the statements.

Our patient was in his thirties, drunk, Lithuanian and had a two inch cut to the top of his head, his friend was similarly drunk and the first thing his friend tried doing was to chat up my crewmate. Then chat up the police officer.

Both women gave him short shrift unsurprisingly.

Even our patient told him to go away.

We then sat the injured party down in our ambulance and started getting a history. It was the usual sort of thing, he'd had a bottle thrown at him because his friend and him had been talking to the wrong women. Thankfully he wasn't too badly hurt, and while he needed stitches, he wasn't bleeding at the time.

All throughout our assessment and treatment, and while the officer was taking a statement he was jolly, engaging and full of good humour. He tried to chat up the police officer but unlike his friend he was charming and quite slick.

So a rather nice chap - quite unlike our normal customers in these circumstances.

He asked about joining the police as a translator, apparently he spoke six languages, the officer thought that this was a good idea and asked him if he'd ever been arrested.

"Yes", he said, "Drink driving. Four times".

Suddenly we didn't like him any more. He explained how it is apparently normal to drink drive in Lithuania and if you get caught then you give the arresting officer £15 and they let you go. I have no idea if this is the truth.

So he went, in a matter of seconds from a very pleasant patient to a dangerous prat. Of course we didn't treat him any differently, but it was surprising how quickly the atmosphere in the ambulance changed.

He didn't want to go to hospital, he'd been saying this since we'd picked him up and so, despite our attempts to get him to go, he walked off home with nothing more than a bandage over his head wound. Nothing much we could do as he was fully compos mentas.

"Women love scars", he shouted over his shoulder and grinned at us as he started his long walk home.

UPDATE : I just realised that I left my note on this blogpost in at the top of the post. It's how I remember what I should be writing about, a short sentence or two jotted down to jog the memory. On this occasion I accidentally left it in which kind of spoiled the 'surprise'. Oh well, I've decided to leave it there as it's all about the transparent disclosure this blogging lark.

Why am I like Dr. Who?

• I travel in a square vehicle with a flashing light on the top.
• I apparently travel in time - how else do you explain how quickly I get to a location?
• The inside of our ambulance looks bigger than the outside.
• We arrive when chaos reigns, and leave having solved everyone's problems.
• We wear strange clothes and carry weird equipment with us.
• Our vehicles are held together with bodged equipment.
• Sometimes people die around us, sometimes due to violence.
• We come and go, changing lives forever and no-one ever asks us our names.

But why am I most like Dr. Who?

• Because I can't keep a woman for longer than 13 episodes.

Some of these points are more relevant to the original series.