The shops are shutting down like they’re expecting a hurricane and the tubes are full of ruddy-faced twenty-somethings clutching bags full of last minute gifts and two-for-one wrapping paper whilst wheeling their suitcases towards the last trains to suburbia to spend Christmas with the folks. The denizens of Nee Naw Control, however, look on the whole rigamarole with a curious detachment: after all, Christmas Day is just another working day in Nee Naw Land, and as much as we’d like to close down for the holidays and stick the 999 answerphone on (”Sorry, there are no ambulances available today. If you have a life threatening emergency, tough. Don’t you KNOW it’s Christmas??”), tomorrow morning at 7am we will all be back in the control room for business as usual.

It’s the first time that I’ve landed a Christmas Day shift, and I’ve been looking forward to it in a bizarre kind of way — picturing myself taking calls in a Santa Hat, sipping non-alcoholic sherry and munching mince pies at my desk whilst taking a stream of jovial calls about amusing yuletide accidents: Santas overheating in their costumes and fainting, people getting electrocuted by their own fairy lights and getting their hands stuck in their turkeys after some over enthusiastic stuffing.

I suspect, though, that I am living in a fantasy world and once tomorrow’s calls get underway, I’ll forget it’s Christmas altogether. I anticipate a lot of extra suspected heart attacks which turn out to be indigestion, drunken teenagers and family brawls. I’m hoping not to get anyone dead, because death takes on an extra air of wrongness this time of year, when you can imagine the deceased’s presents sitting unopened under the tree and the family coming home from the hospital and silently taking down the tinsel. I’m hoping the extra timewasters created by the lack of taxis and public transport will be cancelled out by those would-be timewasters who don’t want to spend Christmas in A+E.

I’m feeling a bit sorry for myself right now, because this is the first Christmas Eve that I can remember that I have spent alone. Usually I would be out on the town with my friends from Back Home, singing along tunelessly to dreadful yuletide tunes and wearing comedy antlers, and instead I am languishing alone in my flat (my girlfriend has gone to Yorkshire to see her family) eating mince pies and watching repeats of Airline At Christmas before retiring to bed in anticipation of a 5am start tomorrow.

It’s not all doom and gloom though. In the midst of all the unfestive stabbings, assaults and untimely deaths today, one of the call takers took a call from a hysterical woman whose baby was not breathing. Despite the call taker’s best efforts to calm her down, the woman decided to leap into a car and drive to the hospital. This is as good as signing the baby’s death warrant: someone who is not breathing will be brain dead in three minutes if CPR is not started, and doing CPR whilst driving is not recommended, if not impossible. But we had no mobile number for her, so that was that. However, on the way to the hospital, the mother passed an ambulance going the other way and decided to call 999 in an attempt to get it to stop for her. This time, she came through to me. I looked at the original call:

“Your baby’s not breathing?”
“No!”
“blah blah blah resus protocol waffle… put your ear to her mouth… is she breathing?”
“Yes! She’s breathing!”

The cynical amongst us would say that the baby had been breathing all along, but for the sake of festiveness, I’d like to consider it a little Christmas miracle.

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