Thursday, January 03, 2008

Two-thousand-zero-eight

Party over?

Oops!

Out of time.

[The other night I partied] like it was two-thousand-and-eight.

(With thanks to Prince)

Christmas was...

Different.

It comes with the territory that as an emergency service worker, chances are you're going to be working whist others are out having fun, sleeping, eating etc...

I worked Christmas Eve and Christmas Day nights for my sins, coming off-shift into Boxing Day morning.

Christmas Eve was ridiculously busy. Very little goodwill on the streets to men or women really. Fights going off all over the place and a colleague accidentally gave me a facefull of CS-spray during a scuffle.

Lovely stuff.

Christmas Day night was thankfully very quiet indeed and most of us disregarded the mounds of paperwork, patrolling and chilled out for a change. We all brought in food to nibble and had a bit of an impromptu buffet in the station. I'd slept most of the day before that, I was home alone and to be honest if I hadn't have watched the Doctor Who christmas special I wouldn't have noticed it was Christmas at all! So to have some sort of festivity later on was nice and heart-warming.

Boxing day, early hours, I drove up to the parents in East Yorkshire. Presented myself about 09:00hrs, chatted over a cup of tea for about a half-hour before collapsing into bed. Woke up around 16:00 and helped the family get snacks & drinks together for the 'clan' get-together at our place a few hours later. After much chat, food, drinks, Jenga and board games I once again collapsed into bed.

27th - Relaxed. Did very little. Perfect.

28th - Mother & I hit the sales. Bought very little really apart from a new colour printer, and even that was from a Tesco Extra!

29th - I hung out with friends back Yorkshire-way who I hadn't seen for ages. All good fun, good company.

30th - Unfortunately it was back to work. Drat.

New Year's Eve, as luck would have it, I was on earlies. This meant that even with extended workign hours this allowed me to finish at 18:00 and still have time to drive down to see girlfriend and celebrate with her. Along with her lad we went round to some friends of hers for chat, drinks and board games for the evening. A good night was had by all. I was awoken at around 01:30 by the girlfriend as I'd fallen asleep on the hosts' sofa. They did however cut me some slack when it was pointed out that I'd been up since 05:00 the previous morning.

New Year's Day - Back to work at 15:00, however still plenty of time to sleep off the hangover and drive up back to work.

How did you celebrate yours?

5 comments:

Mousie said...

I can't really remember :o/

Happy New Year though!

Mousie x

Inspector Monkfish said...

What do you think - was it worth it?

I have been thinking of you over Christmas and New Year, and I have shared with a few people the tale of "my policeman friend" who was getting home Christmas morning to go back out Christmas night.

Is it a long journey from yours over to your parents?

I like the fact that you say, with regards to your family, "presented myself about 09:00hrs". You have got your formal head in gear now, haven't you ;)

Thank you, Ing.

Here's wishing you a very happy new year, with enormous ups during your downtime to make up for the downs of your shattering uptime.

Anonymous said...

I spent the evening at home with my folks, played cards and board games with my dad and got to bed at about 2am after watching Dylan Moran and Phill Jupitus do some standup on Paramount Comedy.

Not very exciting, but better than a screaming hangover!

HAppy New Year!

Inspector Monkfish said...

Hello Ing, how's it going?

I was listening to them talking about Afghanistan on the radio this morning, and I thought of your brother, and your most recent blog post.

I apologise for my noseyness, but I wondered where your brother spent Christmas day?

Northerner said...

Luckily bro was back in the UK for xmas. He's going for a detachment in the coming weeks but thankfully its domestic for a change...

Hope all's well with you in the meanwhile!