I slid myself into the seat opposite Mohmar, why he kept picking this cheap takeaway shop as a place to meet I'll never know. He was finishing off his kebab, given what I'd been doing earlier in the day, the thinly sliced meat covered in chilli sauce wasn't what I wanted to look at.

I stared out the window and watched a double-decker bus go past.

"You wanted to ask me about dragons?", he said to me not looking up from the remains of his meal.

"Yeah, dragons", I tried to take even more interest in what was happening outside the window, normal folks going about normal business never needing to have the sort of insane conversation I was having. But talking to Mohmar was the only way I could get the information I needed.

"You know birds are dinosaurs", he said to me seemingly out of the blue, "that's what dinosaurs turned into after the extinction event. Feathers are just modified scales."

"Sure", I replied, "but I'm not talking dinosaurs, I'm talking thaumavores - big honking dragons."

"Yeah, but think on it for a minute. Dragons feed on magic, that's what 'thaumavore' means. When the amount of free magic in the world started falling they couldn't get enough to eat."

I shrugged, "If you say so".

"Think of it like this - you know Barnaby, the river troll who lives under Westminster bridge? He just looks like a big smelly homeless guy right, don't look unusual at all? Well, imagine picking him up and sticking him in a place where the ambient level of magic is higher, say Stonehenge. Put him there and he'll get bigger and greener and those warts'll turn into horns and before you know it he'll be a troll again".

I tried to picture Barnaby in his true form. It wasn't a pleasant thought.

"You've got to think of it like this", he continued picking absentmindedly at a bit of salad, "without a certain level of magic in the world the dark creatures, the thaumavores, start to lose their defences, so they changed into things that made it easier to hide."

"I'm still trying to see what this has to do with dragons", I asked.

"OK, so here in the fallen world the levels of magic went down. Dragons are very much like special dinosaurs, so what do you think they turned into?"

"Birds?", I couldn't really fault his logic but in the circles we both walked in, logic couldn't be relied on.

"Correct", he smiled and looked me straight in the eyes, "But, what specific type of bird do you think they turned into?"

"I've no idea. Storks?", I looked out the window again and hoped he'd get to the point.

"Well, you are looking for a type of bird that likes gold - dragons liked to sit on hoards of gold, right? And you are looking for a type of bird that has some serious mythology behind them, something approaching fear or respect."

"Go on", but I suddenly had a feeling I knew where this was going.

"Look at the magpie", he said waving his hands in the air, "Known to steal expensive jewellery, all the better to build their hoard, and if you meet one in the street you are supposed to salute it, thereby showing it respect and avoiding bad luck. They mate for life, just like dragons, and they are one of the species of birds that can talk if you let them. They are also the only bird that can recognise itself in a mirror. And that's pretty rare even amongst you mammals."

I let the insult slide, "So, if I'm hunting dragons, I should be hunting magpies? How do I find a quiescent dragon amongst all the magpies of London?"

"Look to the Parliament of Crows", he said getting up from his seat and making his way to the door, "I reckon they'll have an idea who the top predator is".

I sat and stared at the empty plate, grateful that Tower Hill is only a few tube stops away.

-----

Yes, yes, I read too much SF/Fantasy and play too many RPGs. I don't apologise, I like my fantasy as an escape from the reality I deal with normally.

A controversial database which holds the details of every child in England has now become available for childcare professionals to access.

ContactPoint was a response to Lord Laming's report following the death of Victoria Climbie, who was abused by her great aunt and the aunt's boyfriend.

But the system, costing £224m, was delayed twice amid data security fears.

The government says it will enable more co-ordinated services for children and ensure none slips through the net.

But in 2007, a report into the project by auditors Deloitte and Touche said it could never be totally secure.

Last summer ministers delayed the database, admitting there were some "issues" identified in testing.

It says 390,000 people will have access to the database, but will have gone through stringent security training.

And it is a certainty that not one of those 390,000 people will be able to be blackmailed or bribed in order to give up a child's details.

Ahem.

I would suggest that giving over a third of a million people 'stringent' security training will be rather harder to do than the government thinks it will be.

Much like getting children used to handing over their fingerprints to borrow library books it seems that we are educating tomorrows generation to be content that the government has all their details.

The hospital was the perfect place for him. In a hospital people die all the time, so if there was a mistake no-one would notice. People also came and went regularly, the effects of his hunger wouldn't be as obvious than if he chose just one person to maintain him.

He'd haunt the wards at night, hidden in the shadows. He'd long ago mastered the skill of being nearly invisible in the dark. Sometimes a nurse on her rounds would walk past him. He'd push himself back against the wall and hold his breath while the nurse passed, oblivious to his presence.

He'd go from patient to patient, snipping out a day or two of their lives. He left no trace and who would notice their lifespan reduced by a few hours? It's not like anyone knew when they would die.

It wasn't blood he drank, nothing so base. What he took was time, nibbling away at the thread of the person's lifetime.

The only time that someone would die would be if they were near death already. He'd learned to avoid those that were too ill. Once, many years ago, he'd been feeding from a patient and he felt their life just slip away. Alarms had sounded at the nursing station and he'd barely managed to clamber through the window before the crash team arrived.

He could still taste that final drop of life. It tasted like ash.

Sometimes he would risk the maternity ward, what baby, with seventy years of life left in them would notice a week or two of life drained away to feed him?

It was only fair, after all he kept darker, nastier things away from the hospital.

Each life tasted different, some had the flowery taste of opportunity, others a heady broth of experiences and regrets.

He'd started to feed from the staff, the doctors and nurses who'd seen so much - he liked their flavour the best because they had witnessed it all, life, death and all that lay between. Their lives tasted of a thousand things at once, each experience adding it's own distinct seasoning to a life well lived.

He'd started feeding from them more and more often, the taste of other lives could not compare to that of the nurses. He knew it was wrong, that to take too much from one person would cut their life short by years, not days but he couldn't help himself.

The nurses would say that it was the work, the shifts, the stresses that aged them. But he knew the truth.

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Yep - I've completely run out of things to write, which means that I might be posting fragments of fiction for the rest of this week - perhaps even a sneak preview of what I'm working on at the moment.

I really need to get back to work. Only then will normal service be resumed.

I'm mentioned in this column for 5th estate,

Scott Pack, publisher of The Friday Project, shares this philosophy. Acquired by HarperCollins last year, The Friday Project operates under an innovative publishing model - releasing titles under Creative Common licenses and distributing digital copies of books for free. According to Pack, they “have always experienced positive sales as a result of giving away free books.” When the Friday Project made one of their most successful titles, Blood, Sweat and Tea, available as a free downloand from their website, sales immediately jumped. The results of giving away free books has been so consistently positive, in fact, that Pack plans to find even more for creative ways to give the follow up, ‘More Blood, More Sweat and Another Cup of Tea’, away for free. “We are looking to make More Blood…available for free on any platform we can, as well as creating an Issuu widget so that anyone else can share it as well.”

Which is good, it's always been my belief that giving away my book leads to more sales and it's nice to see that we have the numbers to prove that. If it didn't sell more I don't think that Harper would let me release book two in a similar way,in fact in a way that makes the free download even more attractive and easier to obtain.

I'm really happy that Scott is handling my book.

Playing For Change | Song Around The World "Stand By Me" from Concord Music Group on Vimeo.

As highlighted by RRD

Some quick comments to two pieces of ambulance news.

A chief constable has said he fears an injured person will die in the back of a police car heading for hospital due to poor ambulance response times.

Mick Giannasi of Gwent Police, was commenting after it emerged 92 people had to be taken to hospital by his officers over six months.

In December 2008 alone, police cars were used as a last resort 41 times because ambulances were not available.

I'd like to see the LAS figures on the number of calls that come to us from the police, normally assaults, that have 'no units to send'. The police are just as busy and stretched as us, and often our jobs overlap - it's just a matter of numbers that we sometimes end up doing each other's work. To be honest, given the exceedingly minor injuries that a lot of 'assaults' cause, it would seem a waste to have an ambulance pick up someone with a few scratches, of course using a police car in such a case, while quicker, is still not an ideal use of resources.

But picture the uproar from the headline 'Assault victim told to make own way to hospital'. Even if such an assault is a scratch the bad PR isn't worth it - which is one reason why we take everyone to hospital.

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A Derbyshire man is angry his 98-year-old mother had to wait several hours for an ambulance, on two occasions, after injuring herself in falls.

Brian Beardsley said his mother Agnes had lengthy waits for an ambulance called by a doctor at her Ilkeston care home on 4 March and 27 April.

Mr Beardsley says the waits were not acceptable for a 98-year-old.

East Midlands Ambulance Service officials apologised for the delay but said they had to prioritise 999 calls.

Mrs Beardsley, who has a history of falling, suffered head injuries during three falls in one day at the Victoria Care Home on 27 April.

Paramedics were on hand in minutes for two but for the third she had a lengthy wait.

Sadly the number of ambulances available are not infinite, and so all calls have to be prioritised - in this case the patient had been seen by a doctor who said that a four hour wait was acceptable, and she had to wait twenty minutes longer than that. I'm trying my hardest to see how this is 'news'. Note that when a doctor hadn't been out to see her first that 'Paramedics were on hand in minutes'. The flip side of the story is of course 'My husband died of a heart attack while ambulance crews dealt with a minor injury already seen by a doctor'.

It's lovely to be hated so much.

Due to being off sick I've been spending a lot of time in bed (as animals in captivity are wont to do) and the reason why I've been waking up at 10am is because that is when the alarm has gone off for me to take my pill.

Except this morning, which explains some of the early morning blogposts. Instead I was woken up by a polar bear.

I was dreaming about attending the Eurovision song contest, Ewan Spence was there (as he is in real life, doing a sterling job blogging and reporting it) and I was with him. Then we went outside where I was attacked by a polar bear that grabbed at my legs.

This woke me up and was, I suspect, a dream brought about as a consequence of the restless legs I've been having.

So I wrote and read some blog posts from bed for two hours and then nodded back off to sleep.

Where in my dream a polar bear was attacking my house and managed to drag off my father (who I haven't seen for over twenty years, and have barely thought of at all in that time). This time it was the alarm that woke me up, not the bear nibbling on my legs.

Is the universe trying to tell me something, something obvious like 'avoid polar bears', or do I just need one of those nice jackets that does up at the back? Does the inclusion of Ewan mean that his 'marketing' is working so well he has seared himself on my subconscious?

I just don't know - all I do know is that I'm avoiding the zoo for some time.

I finished a computer game the other day - Saint's Row 2 on the Xbox 360. This is a very rare event, normally I'll play a game for around 2/3rds of it\s length and then get bored and play something else. Either that or I'll get stuck and give it up rather than throw the controller across the room.

(I found that the best way to play Saints Row 2 is to play like some sort of 90's comic book villain - it makes the insanity of the game more... 'real' is the wrong word, maybe 'internally consistent').

Meanwhile I haven't touched World of Warcraft in the past few weeks - in part this is due to frustration at my inability to complete one of the yearly achievements due to a 'Player Vs. Player' component and partly due to a realisation that I wasn't hugely enjoying the game anymore.

During this extended period of time off work (something that I can see ending soon) I could have spent a lot of time grinding my way through Warcraft, even taking part in more 'end-game content'; something that is difficult for me to do normally due to the need to play with other people - co-ordinating these meetings is a bit of a pain when your workday finishes around 19:00, frequently later and nine other people are relying on you.

But instead I found that I was looking at my time in Azeroth (the WoW gameworld) as being like a job, and a not very enjoyable job at that.

I think I understand why I have fallen out of love of Warcraft - in part it's because it doesn't provide what I'm looking for.

Essentially I am a 'role-player', I like to play a role of a character, my aside about playing Saints Row 2 as a comic book villain is telling in that I was playing a 'role' rather than just using my game character as a proxy to shoot my way across the game world.

In my MMORPG I'd love to actually play a character with a bit of a backstory and drives and ambitions that form how that character looks at the world - When I started playing WoW for instance, my Paladin character was a disappointment to his family and so he busied himself looking for the Progenitors of the Azeroth world, being a replacement for a more normal drive to please his parents.

In the latest expansion to WoW the backstory has a lot of content about these Progenitors - so you would think that this would make me happy.

Sadly, while trying to listen to a very 'lore-heavy' NPC talk I was constantly being harranged by the group I was with that I was wasting time in listening to the speech and that I should start killing monsters again.

It would seem that Hell is, indeed, other people.

In these multiplayer games the chance to play a role is often spoiled by other players who just wish to rush through the content and grab the rewards. Even in a game server that is explicitly reserved for role-players.

This cannot compare to the single-player game where, while there is no audience, to watch your role-play, at least the world can remain fairly consistent within your own head. With no computer controlled character breaking character and telling you that you are 'n00bish'.

So, I suspect that I'll be cancelling my WoW account, as an open-ended game the chance to sink hours of time into it when I am gaining little pleasure means that I'm paying to to work, not have fun.

Instead I shall concentrate on some of the single player games that I have sitting on my gaming shelf. Next up will probably be either 'Mass Effect' or 'Fable 2', both games I seem to have stopped playing at that 2/3rds mark.

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The other reason to drop WoW is that it's all about the questing - where is the game where I can work towards being the best woodcutter I can possibly be without having to become a 'hero' and beat up monsters?

I would guess that EVE-Online might be the closest one can get to this idea, but is also another huge time-sink, and is perhaps lacking a little in the 'game' component due to the concentration on the business simulation.

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Incidentally, the complete soundtrack for 'Beyond Good and Evil', one of my favourite games is available here - 'Beyond Good and Evil', besides being an excellent game (currently on Steam) was one of the first games I played where the in-game music completely blew me away.

It's not elegant and it's not sexy – it looks like a large photocopier – but the Espresso Book Machine is being billed as the biggest change for the literary world since Gutenberg invented the printing press more than 500 years ago and made the mass production of books possible. Launching today at Blackwell's Charing Cross Road branch in London, the machine prints and binds books on demand in five minutes, while customers wait.

Which makes for all sorts of interesting if you can get your own book out from, say a USB memory stick, and into the real world. I may have to have a wander down there and see it in action myself one day.
I see this as a precursor of all things 3D printer-y.

High-end journalism is dying in America and unless a new economic model is achieved, it will not be reborn on the web or anywhere else. The internet is a marvelous tool and clearly it is the informational delivery system of our future, but thus far it does not deliver much first-generation reporting. Instead, it leeches that reporting from mainstream news publications, whereupon aggregating websites and bloggers contribute little more than repetition, commentary and froth. Meanwhile, readers acquire news from the aggregators and abandon its point of origin –namely the newspapers themselves.

In short, the parasite is slowly killing the host.

Which is similar to what, in part, I was aiming at here.

Today will probably be 'lots of links' day.

We were finishing up our paperwork at the hospital when my crewmate's mobile phone rang. It was one of our fast car drivers and he was asking if we could hurry up our time at hospital because he had a nasty job that needed to get to hospital quickly. We were the only crew who weren't currently dealing with a patient and so we 'greened up' and, after getting the job from Control headed over to his location.

We arrived on scene to find the patient's elderly husband and her daughter already there - the FRU and patient were nowhere to be seen. We were directed to the top of the stairs where the FRU was trying to persuade the patient to go to hospital.

"She's stubborn", the daughter said, "we fitted a stairlift for her, but she's too stubborn to use it".

It would seem that this elderly woman was heading upstairs to bed and had tripped up the stairs - in part because she never used the stairlift.

She was arguing with the FRU, he was telling her that she needed to go to hospital, she was insisting that she just wanted to go to bed. If her injuries weren't too bad we might be able to leave her at home.

What she had done was far from a minor injury.

Both of her shins were essentially 'degloved', the skin on her shins had gone and there was little left except for bone. Surprisingly there was less blood than you would think, but this was a very serious injury, quite possibly one that she wouldn't recover from. To be honest it was one of the nastiest injuries that I'd ever seen.

Given how long leg wounds can take to heal in the elderly, it wouldn't surprise me if, coupled with her other medical problems, that this vast injury would lead to her death.

We managed to persuade her into our carry chair and then essentially browbeat her into going to hospital. We dressed the wounds as best we could and took her to hospital.

What sticks in my mind is that if she hadn't been so stubborn, if she had used the stairlift that her family had fitted for her, then we wouldn't have been needed and our patient wouldn't have suffered a potentially fatal injury.

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The other reason why this job sticks in my head is because my mum is likewise stubborn, and I can see her killing herself falling off a chair while changing a lightbulb, or seriously injuring herself doing something daft rather than ask me or my brother for help.

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For those that care about my suffering, since I started on the Ciprofloxacin I've not had a decent night sleep, mostly due to restless legs or just through waking up during the night. I have this for a month, so, y'know, please send sympathies and Diazepam.

Back when I was an A&E nurse I would tell people that the job had 'broken me' , that there was no way you could do any other job after working in a busy A&E department. Any other job would be either too boring, or that my own values of what is really important* would make me unsuitable for any work that involves 'profit'.

I'd lose a company millions of pounds and then turn around and, shrugging, say, "at least nobody died".**

Then I left nursing and joined the ambulance service. While it has it's differences, a sizeable chunk of the work that we do is pretty much the same, make people happier than they were when they first met you, the cause of this unhappiness normally being something to do with their health.

Some months ago I got extremely disillusioned with the job, even my friends outside the service noticed my deep unhappiness and mentioned it to me. I started looking for other jobs, one was for a communications officer for the LAS which I was unsuccessful at getting, others were outside the NHS. I started casting out feelers for other jobs, perhaps from some of the networking that I'd been doing at the conferences I attended or spoke at.

Out of the blue I was offered a consultancy job with a business, just part-time, eight hours or so a week, concentrating on 'internet culture', 'social media', blogging' and all that other non-technical web stuff.

The pay was good, the people at the office were friendly and there was a certain boost to the ego on account of being referred to as the 'internet expert'.

But, what I would almost hope for, as I sat typing away in the office, was that someone would fall sick so that I could spring into action and do something more interesting than compose emails and action plans.

It was hard to generate any excitement for other people's business and to remain enthused in subjects that I had no real interest in.

There was a certain amount of dishonesty on my part which I found very hard to keep up. When I say dishonest I don't mean in the way that fraud or lying is dishonest, but to try and keep the energy up when dealing with something outside my normal sphere of interest was draining me.

I was being dishonest to myself.

So when I had the chance to resign from it as a regular gig, I leapt at it.

As I write this I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I can get back to my 'proper' work soon. Despite it's many flaws, it's still a job that I can get excited about, that I have interest in and that lets me be completely honest with myself, and the people who I work with.

So it looks like I'm condemned to work on the ambulances until I drop dead or retire, whichever comes first.

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People often tell me, "I couldn't do what you do", but I think that the next time I pick someone up from an office environment it might well be me saying that for a change.

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*Breathing and having a pulse - money comes pretty much at the bottom of any list I make of 'things that are important'.

**Actually, given the current financial situation across the world, perhaps I would have fitted in perfectly.

A Sunday Mirror investigation has revealed how Lewis Day Medical Services billed for phantom trips supposed to have been made by a non-existent driver.

An average of 20 journeys were faked EVERY DAY, and the scam lasted for more than 18 months. The minimum charge for each journey was £8.60. But some cost cashstrapped hospitals £109 a time.

In one instance Villas's fake ID was used to charge £73.20 to take a patient with lung disease just two miles home. In fact, the trip had been cancelled hours before because the patient was too ill to travel.

Our investigators were passed a secret file listing all the fraudulent journeys relating to Villas. We handed the evidence to the NHS, who called in their own detectives. Lewis Day subsequently agreed to pay back £281,894 to Imperial College NHS Trust.

Despite the fraud being discovered, Lewis Day will carry on working for Imperial College NHS Trust because it is tied into a contract. And there is no prospect of anyone being prosecuted.

Wow.

More and more the NHS is relying on private ambulance companies, initially for this sort of patient transport and increasingly for A&E work. (More on which later). Sadly I suspect that this isn't going to be the exception and I foresee other companies being caught out in a similar fashion.

The very interesting thing is that

Despite the fraud being discovered, Lewis Day will carry on working for Imperial College NHS Trust because it is tied into a contract. And there is no prospect of anyone being prosecuted.

I can say, with some certainty that if I were to be found guilty of fraud I'd, quite rightly, be out on my ear. So why isn't this happening to this company?

My suspicion is that it would cost the trust more money to run the contract bidding system again, that or someone in Lewis Day has a friend or two in high places. I can't see any other reason how such a serious fraud would occur without the police being informed. I mean, the LAS has issued guidance on the sort of kit that we can keep in our cars - it's a small list with such items as 'Latex gloves - three pair only', they would be a bit upset if I were to steal over a quarter of a million pounds.

And then, when I get caught, go 'oops - here, have it back - no hard feelings eh?', and head out to pick up my next patient with hardly a word spoken.

Here is hoping that the other ambulance companies take a long hard look at the way they run things and the people that they employ in order to prevent similar situations happening in the future.

I've not been blogging for a bit as I've been spending time getting my head around certain things - while some people urn to the Bible I tend to turn to 'Transmetropolitan' or 'The Invisibles'.

I had my appointment with the urology consultant concerning my rather painful epididymitis, I'm still off work because if I do anything other than recline or lay flat it feels as if someone has kicked me in the unmentionables.

The consultant was excellent, we had a bit of a laugh and he's written me up for a month worth of antibiotics. He also suggested that I regularly ejaculate - which, as a single man, means only one thing.

I do try to follow my doctor's orders.

Sadly it wasn't all good news, apparently it can take longer than a month to clear up and that is no guarantee. There is also a possibility that it will never go, or go and come back a few months later.

Something to look forward to...

I'm hopeful that I'll be able to get back to work in a week or two - I'm starting to go nuts* sitting reclining around my flat planning for my third book.

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*No pun intended - honest.