Things I've Accidentally Done

Over the many years of my life, I’ve done a variety of things that I never planned to do. They just kind of happened. As a young girl, I was a Brownie. I hated it. The uniform. The rules. The lack of interesting activities. Maybe I just joined the wrong group. Then I looked for something else to do. I joined St John Ambulance. I was too young to actually do any first aid on real people, but I learned lots and was often put outside Woolworths on a Saturday morning, rattling the tin to raise money for the charity. Did they think people would feel sorry for a young girl standing in the wind and rain, looking miserable? It worked, as my tin was always full at the end of the day.

In my first job as an office junior for an insurance broker, they were instrumental in developing so many of the skills that I still use now. They taught me the importance of filing correctly so that things can be found years later. In those days, the files were paper and kept in the cellar with the spiders. Nowadays, most of my filing is on the computer, but I do have a paper system too. I was part of the YOP scheme (Youth Opportunities Programme), which meant my employer received money for employing me, provided they allowed me to go to college one day a week. So, for one day a week, I went to Calderdale College to learn touch-typing. I’d briefly attempted to learn to type at school, but it interfered with more interesting things like hockey and netball.

What an experience those college classes were! All in rows, learning to type on a manual typewriter, using carbon paper, Tipp-Ex, and getting your knuckles rapped if you looked at the keys. But by the time I finished, I was a pretty fast and accurate typist. Touch typing is something I can still do, but now it’s on a computer keyboard. On the manual typewriter, I struggled to type the numbers without looking and for some obscure reason, I still can’t touch-type the numbers on my keyboard. Clearly, my fear of numbers includes touching them on the keys, not just having to calculate them.

In those classes, I also had my first experience of somebody having an epileptic episode. It was a strange event which began with the young man sitting next to me ignoring the teacher when she was talking to him. I was gobsmacked that he just continued to ignore her and look straight ahead, just tapping the table with his pen. But what amazed me even more was that the teacher seemed to ignore it and just stood next to him. All of a sudden, he seemed to remember his manners and began talking again. The teacher smiled and asked if he was OK. “Did I have a seizure?” he asked. That was my introduction to the different ways epilepsy can present itself.

My next training course was First Aid at Work. There I learned everything from CPR, the recovery position, and, of course, epilepsy. All things I hoped that I’d never have to deal with on a real person.

Fast forward a few years, and I moved to Scotland and met Mr M. He was a volunteer first aider with St Andrew’s Ambulance. Discovering he absolutely loved this, I decided that rather than him doing his thing and me waiting for him to get back, I’d join too. After all, I did have quite a bit of experience. So I joined and was often seen at football matches at Hampden, Parkhead and Ibrox, along with some concerts, including the Proclaimers. People joked that I was the only person who didn’t like football but got to some of the largest football matches in the country for free. Yes, I had to do first aid on real people, including everything from stemming a bleed to CPR!

Along the way, I discovered that my true vocation was learning and development. I worked for a training company for many years, then moved to Scotland, moved companies, and then set up my own vocational training company. Guess what we also delivered? Yes, First Aid at Work. I also did assessing and training for the British Red Cross.

When we closed the training company to open our tearoom, I thought that was the end of first aid. But as we always told people in the courses, first aid is a skill we should all have, for ourselves, for our family, and colleagues. In the tearoom, I recognised that the burn I inflicted on myself by pouring hot soup straight from the soup kettle was serious enough for a trip to the local ambulance station. Then, when I was on Ben Lawers, I recognised that I was having a heart attack. I survived both incidents, just in case you were wondering.

This week, with my seven-year-old granddaughter, Minnie, staying with us, she asked if we could have tea outside in Evie the campervan on the drive. We did so, then we spent some time lying on the bed looking out of the window and watching the clouds go by. But she decided to tell me about her enrichment lesson where they had been learning first aid. She told me she’d learned something about that chest-pressing thing, but she couldn’t remember much about that. She did, however, remember how to put somebody into the recovery position, which she demonstrated on me very admirably. She has also demonstrated, for the purposes of photos for this blog, how to perform the recovery position on a unicorn baby.

Recently I’ve been introducing Minnie and Harley to my writing via my Florence books, and hoping that I might inspire them to become avid readers and maybe even writers themselves. But it appears that somehow, Minnie has inherited my first aid skills.

So if you are ever in need of somebody to put you in the recovery position, Minnie is the girl for that. But don’t rely on her for CPR just yet.