The other day I was hanging out at The Citadel (Piers says I should just call it HQ like everyone else, but I don’t think that has enough gravitas), when Seamus came in looking like Simon had stolen his last krispy kreme.
I asked him what was wrong and it turned out that the old coronavirus hoohah has meant that we’ve been called out even less than usual, and lets face it – once you remove all the stand-downs, wrong numbers, self deployments and fictional searches that’s a pretty low number to start off with.
“But didn’t you tweet that we were busier than the whole of the rest of the UK added together the other day?” I asked.
“I lied, you fool!” He replied, somewhat brusquely. “I only do that to get people to donate money for the New SUV / New Court Case funds. You know as well as I do, we go out about as often as the Olympic blinking Flame.”
“Oh,” I said “That is a shame. I feel like a run out in The Interceptor, like when we used to do those crazy convoys down the M3..” I caressed my soft leather slingback driving gloves as I thought about it and let myself imagine the open road beneath our wheels, when..
“That’s it!” he cried “Sometimes it’s actually worth having you hang around here! Well, almost”. I just stared and tried to process what he meant. “What do you mean?” I just asked in the end.
“What I mean my not-very-nice-but-dim public schoolboy chum is this. We’ll round up the usual suspects – you, James, Tim, that dim ginger one who repeats what I say – all those guys – and we’ll have a road trip! Even better, we’ll say we have to do it to keep the vehicles in blue-light condition and try to screw some money out of the twitter morons!”
“So we’ll just drive around the M25 in a convoy for no reason, put it on social media and ask for money for it?” I asked.
“Got anything better to do on a Saturday afternoon?” he asked, knowing full well I didn’t. At least I’d be able to give The Interceptor a bit of a burn.
And the rest, as they say, is history….
2 replies on “the rescue hero diaries..”
Hold on, I was reading on Facebook this morning that Surrey SAR have had their busiest year on record yet this post intimates that this isn’t the case, could it be that someone is telling porkies on social media to big themselves up?
It was strange to see that someone opened the thread up for debate by challenging what constitutes a call-out but no one has answered the question.
Yet another vehicle on the cards for Surrey SAR according to twitter, ‘callsign X-Ray’ – you must have one each by now haven’t you?
It’s already a running joke throughout LR about Surrey’s fleet, as I heard someone from another team say on a course (before lockdown) ‘perhaps Surrey should buy a minibus to collect all the mutual aid requests they make’.