coat. Still, I wish we had chosen Barcelona over London when deciding on a city in which to base ourselves for a few years of European exploration.
It’s colder than deep-sea diving off Alaska. Even with the windows up and my green fleece zipped tight I feel like an ice sculpture. We drop the patient off at his five-star nursing home – quite literally ‘drop’ as Henry claims he ‘wasn’t ready’ with the head end of the stretcher at the moment I called ‘one, two, three’. I’ve come to expect this kind of thing when Henry is way past his fried chicken and chips time. It will be his third lot in a single morning. Another of his shirt buttons is sure to pop before the day’s end.
We park at a Harley Street corner so we can make a rapid response to the next boring transfer. As the rain thunders on the window, I watch Henry munching fried chicken, getting it tangled in his scraggly ginger beard and dropping it down the front of his uniform. In fact, his uniform is already stained from previous fried chickens. With a belly like that there’s only one place falling chicken tends to land.
‘So, you is telling me you once got a hundred quid tip off a Arab?’ he says as he eats, displaying the contents of his mouth.
‘Yeah, Kuwaiti royal family.’
‘Kuwai-i royal family?’ he licks his lips, looks annoyed. ‘I neva got nufink offa tha Kuwai-i royal family. Took one of ’em in too, I did. Had a hip done, he did. But tha Kuwai-i royal family never looked arfta Henry, did vey.’
I sigh and glance at my watch, wondering what the Kuwaiti royal family would have thought about an ambulance stinking of fried chicken, driven by a maniac.
‘Mate, you know we got a Arab later on,’ says Henry, ‘four-firtey in from Heafrow …’
‘An Arab, Henry, it’s an Arab.’
‘Yeah, dats wot I said, a Arab.’
Worst thing about having an ambulance with a broken stereo is that it forces one to listen to a partner chewing fried chicken and using bad English in England.
‘Well,’ I reply, ‘it’s nearly two o’clock, and you know the traffic.’
Henry knows the traffic all right. This is part of the problem. He loves nothing more than to plan his day so that unless we use our lights and sirens we’ll be late to every appointment and pick-up. This is because, quite frankly, he loves to use the lights and sirens. When I first met Henry I spotted him right away as a wannabe paramedic who never made the grade. Being an ambulance driver is a little boy’s fantasy as much as being a train driver or bus driver. In most emergency medical systems, however, ambulance drivers must also use clinical skills normally reserved for doctors. This naturally excludes a good number of candidates, Henry included. Society is full of disappointed men and women who have longed to drive ambulances from the age of five when they spent each day constructing matchbox car crashes and sending matchbox ambulances to the scene. Recruitment departments of public emergency services are perpetually inundated by such applicants and spend half their time palming them off.
The only other qualified paramedic working at the company was fired from the London Ambulance Service for visiting a Kensington barbershop while on duty. When I heard this I told him it sounded like unfair dismissal. Medics are normally permitted to visit coffee houses and corner stores in their catchments so long as they can quickly respond. Why not a barbershop? I mean, how long does it take to throw off an apron, brush down a uniform and go out with half a cut? Not long at all. If anything, the gentleman’s commitment to looking sharp and tidy in the workplace should have been commended. As much as I’d prefer it I’m never assigned to work with him. Our boss wants one qualified medic per wagon. And apart from the two of us, the rest are a bunch of fantasists who recently discovered a community college somewhere outside London conducting a five-day first-aid course they believe allows them to use the title ‘paramedic’. Never mind it took me four years of study to earn the same. While I don’t bother wearing anything at all to identify myself as one, these men could not be more decorated. From emergency service catalogues they have mail-ordered paramedic insignia of every description. Cloth patches, embroidered epaulettes, shiny badges, clip-on pins, reflective vests and so on, all emblazoned with the word ‘paramedic’; one ambulance driver is so covered in pins and badges he looks like a walking Christmas tree.
Then there is the gear. While I have trouble locating my stethoscope most days, these men have got every imaginable utility dangling from their belts. There are Leatherman knives, wallets for gloves and scissors, phone holders, torches of various sizes, rolls of Leucoplast, radio holsters, mini disinfectant dispensers, rubber tourniquets and various other oddly-shaped black pouches containing everything but handcuffs. All these are attached for the prime purpose of looking as much like a paramedic as possible, or at least how they imagine a paramedic must look. This I find most entertaining and wonder how I’ve managed to do the same job for so long with nothing on my belt but a buckle.
While some veteran medics would be irritated by such things, I am way more frustrated by the widespread and reckless use of emergency warning devices.
Prince Abdullah al-Sabah’s private jet is to land at Heathrow in twenty minutes and, as I remember from my last conversation with an al-Sabah, they are not fond of tardiness. The Sabahs are thought to hold the largest number of shares in almost all blue-chip companies in the Western world and to have a combined family wealth of US$200 billion. On first meeting the Kuwaitis, my politeness to a veiled female family member was generously rewarded with a crisp fifty pound note pulled from a wad of cash thick as a brick and dispensed by a keffiyeh-wearing aide. Accepting money from patients beyond the agreed payment for services is considered unethical in the medical profession and strictly forbidden for government ambulance workers and hospital staff. But in London’s private health care, tipping seems somehow acceptable and is not uncommon.
‘White car on the left!’ I warn Henry as he comes dangerously close to clipping a sedan that has failed to pull over far enough.
My head is throbbing with the beat of the siren. The Ford Transit parts traffic out of the city like Moses did the Red Sea. It’s slow going, but we’re getting through faster than anyone else.
What is the public thinking, I wonder, those distressed commuters struggling to edge out of our way, imagining the worst? What if they knew that Henry was using his lights and sirens because he thinks it’s fun, because he intentionally ate his fried chicken slow enough for the traffic to build up? And what if they knew I was letting him do it because I’d hate to be late for the Kuwaiti royal family, because I’m hoping for another tip, more than last time – if I’m lucky.
Back in Sydney severe consequences result from the inappropriate use of lights and sirens. Not that we’d bother, anyway. We’re so busy most of the time it’s a relief when the siren is off, allowing us a little peace and quiet. Warning devices are only a novelty for those who don’t use them much.
‘Ow of tha way! Comin’ fru! Move it! Move it! Move it!’ shouts Henry.
‘They can’t hear you,’ I say, wishing he’d shut up.
‘All right, but vey can see me, can’t vey.’
‘See you what?’
‘See me yellin’. Yellin’ and gesticalatin’!’
I don’t know how many private ambulance services there are in London, but ever since routine patient transport was outsourced, every little boy rejected from the LAS could finally drive an ambulance as fast as they like with ‘blues and twos’ – blue flashing lights and a two-tone siren. It was absurd and
