Midweek violence

Rachel and Callum Bunn play host to Mr Tonsilpus on the dark streets of London town during a break in the proceedings.


I don’t like being late. I also don’t like being ill. But most of all I don’t like being late for work. So the latest Tube strike meant loads of extra traffic and an hour and a half to get from Euston Road to Waterloo... and late!


An assault on a young woman by her boyfriend left her lying in the road with facial injuries and a crowd of people around her, including two private ambulance men and a doctor. Two witnesses to the incident stuck around for the police and the assailant chatted on his phone across the road. He showed little interest in the state of his girlfriend.

She’d allegedly been pushed to ground and hit her head hard on the concrete. She may have been knocked out because she had no memory of the event.

A crew arrived to take her away and I chatted to the man and wife who’d seen it all happen. It was one of the most interesting conversations I’ve had with MOPs in a while.


A man was knocked down, sustaining a head injury but he decided, in his drunken state, to get up and stand around with the gathered crowd as police arrived with me. He was dressed to party and didn’t want to leave for hospital until he was persuaded by myself and the cops that it was in his best interests. He was too drunk to make a lucid decision anyway.

When the ambulance arrived he got aboard and, after a long discussion about his refusal to have a collar placed, he produced some white tablets from his pocket – class A I think. I asked him to put them back into his pocket and let the crew know what he had just in case he decided to take them out again for show or distribution. It was going to be one of those nights.


Not long after that I went to the aid of a Geisha who’d fainted at a posh party in Park Lane. It was strange to be treating a lady of her calibre and she was recovering well enough but her history of such collapses was suspicious, so she too had to be persuaded to go with the crew for an ECG and further checks, although this made her nervy and she was adamant that all was okay - her translator had to emphasise the importance of the checks. Luckily the crew was all female and I think that helped.


At a train station in the small hours, a 20 year-old female asked for an ambulance and claimed chest pain. When I arrived I recognised her from a previous call a few months ago. She had a certain M.O. and it involved reeling off her illnesses, which included SLE and asking for pain relief. She may have been having a ‘flare’ and she’d already taken her own Oramorph, so I got her and her suitcases into the car and took her to the nearest hospital which is on the doorstep of the station.

She had crutches with her and I wondered how she'd been managing to get about at this hour (or any hour) of the morning with three cases and two bags. She'd told the station manager that she was waiting for a train because she was going to her brother's place but when he asked her where her brother lived, we had to look at each other - she was in the wrong end of town completely. Her story made no sense.

The nurse immediuately recognised her. She is very, very regular.


Getting punched in the face and batted around the head by a belt buckle is bad enough on a weekend but when you are attacked like that on a boring Tuesday night / Wednesday morning, things are dire. The 19 year-old who ended up in the back of an ambulance tried to break up a fight involving three thugs and a homeless man. This is always a mistake unless you have adequate body armour or a good insurance policy that will benefit your wife and kids.

Luckily for him the extent of his injuries could be described using the word ‘minor’. Cuts to his head and bruising to his face as well as a developing fat lip were all he earned for his good deed. The smoking blonde girl who hugged him as he went into the ambulance was more of a danger to his health I think.


To end the night, another man – a 39 year-old – was pushed to the ground, pinned down and robbed after he invited a man he’d only just met in a club to join him around the corner for sex. He had a bloody mouth sporting a cigarette when I arrived and the atmosphere was generally unsettling because the assailant and his alleged accomplice were still on scene. In fact one of them was brazenly challenging him as club door staff tried to keep him back. I thought I was going to end my shift with a black eye myself. London is not a nice neighbourhood at this time of the day.

Be safe.