Globetrotting

I can hear the murmurings clearly. “He goes and wins the award for Blog of the Year and then promptly stops blogging!” I grant you, it’s a fair whinge. But trust me, the reasons are good ones.

I’m sitting in a room surrounded by suitcases, packing my life into bag after bag, ready to fly off in just a few hours. My London adventure ends here, whilst just over the horizon await a whole new set of challenges. Guesses have been made, since I first mentioned the fact that I had left the London Ambulance Service as to where I was going. Guesses ranged from the south coast of England, to the north coast of Scotland, to the west coast of Australia.

The truth is that I’m heading to the east coast of the Mediterranean – to a little country that punches above its weight in almost every aspect of its existence – Israel.

Let’s start at the beginning: My name’s Aryeh – and I’m an Insomniac. So you see, one of the reasons my blog had to remain anonymous was the fact that with an unusual name like mine, unique in the LAS (in more ways than one, I hear my friends cry), there was no hope of hiding behind a smoke-screen of a more common name such as Adam, or Chris, or Dave. At least in Israel, I can hide amongst the masses of others Aryehs.

It’s a funny old place. Laid back yet highly stressed, open-minded but highly suspicious, and people who are exceptionally friendly or incredibly abrupt – sometimes both at once.

The national ambulance service is completely different from the UK based one. There’s no government funding and it’s privately run as a fee-charging charity. The paramedics and EMT’s who work for them are divided between volunteers who live their normal lives around sporadic shifts and actual paid staff whose day to day life is the ambulance service. Working for them, assuming they accept my paramedic skills as good enough for them, will be a very different experience indeed.

In the meantime, I’ve discovered that I really enjoy teaching first aid to the general public and that might become a new string to add to my bow, either in between ambulance shifts, or, at least at the beginning, instead of them.

It’s a new start for my family and me – but it’s a new start that we’ve been planning for some time, so excitement is, at least for now, overruling the sheer terror of such a big move.

As for the blog, well, I’ll definitely keep writing. What started off as a purely cathartic exercise in creative writing has turned into a project of which I’m exceptionally proud. The writing may be a little sporadic over the next few weeks as we settle into a new reality, but stick around.

We may still have a lot to learn together.