Never Established

Hi everyone! Just a quick note to say Merry Christmas, hope you’ve all had an amazing time, wherever you are and whoever you’re with. Enjoy the holidays and the giving. I’ll be seeing you all soon!

Yesterday I went into the city and did my Basic First Aid course with St. John’s Ambulance. I’d mostly decided to do in for this job: I really, really want it and the second I realised I needed a First Aid Certificate I found the soonest course and enrolled. It helps, of course that I’ve been tossing up doing this course for a few months now.

The basic first aid course essentially equips you for the scary stuff. Heart attack, bleeding, how to bandage, how to give CPR, how to use a defibrillator. You can do it after the course, but would you really want to? I think the motto I took away from it, personally, was ‘treat as much as possible (i.e. stem the bleeding) and then get help quick smart. Full stop. I mean, it’s not like I’m a doctor.

So I complete the course, get my certificate and am driving home. It starts to drizzle – nothing horrible, just enough that I have to turn my windscreen wipers on. Enough to realise that half my wiper has somehow disappeared. How do you lose half a wiper, I wonder? The short wiper was on the driver’s side, and the rain was beginning to mess up my view. I slow down. It’s the beginning of the Christmas road toll; I don’t want my biggest achievement to be ‘another casualty’.

I’m driving along quite happily, pulling up to a light behind a green car. I’m not thinking or singing or doing anything, really. I’m mostly just staring into space. And so I’m shocked when suddenly I here a car horn followed by a smash. I look up, and in those 2, 3 seconds, three cars collided and then skidded off in different directions. A side mirror skidded and then stopped, just in front of the car next to me.

I stop. Holy shit, I think, I’m not actually able to handle this, I just did the course. The car in front of me sees that there’s enough space, and slowly inches past. He wasn’t involved in the accident. No damage. I move further forward. I stop just long enough to check the participants. Everyone is standing upright, everyone looks fine, they’re all talking and looking shaken, but fine. I bite my lip, wonder whether or not to offer help. I check the cars. Front and back bumpers, all of them.  Glancing blows.

I look at the people again, and make my decision. I drive past.

The words of my trainer at St. John’s come back to me: “If you aren’t already involved in the accident, then you aren’t legally required to help. Whether or not you do is entirely a moral decision. You can put your head down and say, ‘I can’t see you, I can’t see you’, and that’s fine. If it’s fine with you.”

Part of me wanted to jump out and be helpful. The other part was thinking “Everyone seems fine, and is one day of training really enough?”

Long, LONG overdue. I’ve rehauled the entire back of the website, so it’s all up to date and done. And, as you can tell, I’ve also played with the layout. More updates will follow — and more pictures, hopefully. There’s still some tweaking I want to do to this layout — I’d like a picture up the top, to begin with, and some colour, etc. But we’ll get to that when we come to it.

Have to go. Mum needs the internet. Will be back in about an hour, still messing around.