Crawling

I met up with the cop from last night’s drama in the park job as he knelt over the supine body of a Latvian drunkard who dropped to the ground in front of him and pretended to be dead so that an ambulance would take him to hospital. When I recognised this and told him I knew he was awake, he opened his eyes and ranted at me about having fought in the Balkans and that he was ‘epileptic’. I told him I wasn’t interested in his war stories; I’ve been to Croatia and Serbia and I know their history – I also know what was done by some of the Serbs in the name of war in those dark days so I wasn’t impressed with his attempt to elicit ignorant sympathy.

He lay there until an ambulance arrived to take him away. His behaviour will never change; as long as we supply his demand, he will continue to cost us dearly. We are chucking good money at a simple problem. All we need is a ‘clean-up crew’ to come and take these people away somewhere that they don’t want to be (not the hospital of their choice). Soon enough they will stop abusing us. And epilepsy is the claim they all make in order to get into hospital. They don’t all suffer from it and his weak and pathetic attempt at having a seizure made no dent in anyone’s conscience.

To top off the entertainment, a number of lice, crawling around his belly and beneath his trouser belt-line, began to show themselves and the crew alerted the nurse to the infestation. I found myself scratching at invisible but perfectly imagino-realistic crawling things for an hour or so afterwards.


A truck waited to turn right at a junction and a car raced along towards it. The truck tentatively moved its position and the racing car swerved sharply to avoid a possible collision, resulting in a head-on crash into a very tall lamp post. I was called at the tail end of the shift and spent twenty minutes unloading the on-the-phone-no-neck-pain driver from his seat as water and God knows what else spilled from the crushed front end of his vehicle. The lamp post was at an angle and the concrete under it had been weakened, so there was a real hazard – if the post fell it was likely to kill one, two or many people.

I did all I could; reassured the drivers, listened to the arguments about who was in the wrong (even though I have nothing to do with that side of it) and generally kept things safe… and as soon as the Fire Service, police and an ambulance got on scene I went back to my station and headed for home.

Be safe.