It’s been a fun weekend. I got to look after an 18 month old Labrador/German Shepherd cross called Weston this weekend. He was absolutely gorgeous, and a wonderful dog. Sat we spent pottering around the house and Nath popped up for dinner. He adored Weston and much fun was had.
Sunday, Weston and I went for a wander down to Cardiff bay, where there was a thing on with some Scouts where the team had a landrover and was showing off, basically. Weston was a huge hit and had more attention than any of the toys we had out, though kids were impressed by the vacuum splint, far less so than the parents, who could appreciate a moulded spinal support system like the vac mat.
So after some fun in the bay and jokes about when the callout would be, we headed home where I went up to the top of the mountain to give Weston a nice walk, since he’d been sat down all day. Not 10m from the car, the pagers went off with a search in Talybont, so I texted the IC with my ETA for base and Weston and I rushed off to Merthyr. We pulled into base just before the first response vehicle was departing and I grabbed my stuff, Weston and his stuff and jumped on Alpha, the control vehicle. Off we go, blue lights and sirens blaring and poor Weston skidding accross the floor. It’s a tough ride in that vehicle up to the Talybont reservoir along the small country lanes, particularly on a respnse drive. Once we arrived, we jumped out and it became apparent that the call was quickly drawing to a close. 3 men had been out all night and one had apparently run out of food, decided he was too tired to walk off and called the police asking for a helicopter to come and pick him off. Someone, quite sensibly, didn’t call the helicopter and instead they were walked off the mountain about one km to where the control point was at the top of the reservoir. After lots of swearing and mumbling about waste of time, we headed off home.
I don’t think I’d been home for more than an hour when the pager went off again, asking for a delayed response for a search in Caldicot for a missing self-harmer, to start at 0900 this morning. Unfortunately, between last week’s drama and an outage over the weekend, I decided that it was time to rack up some brownie points at work instead – which was quite lucky since at 0905 I had a stand down message. After checking the voicebank, it transpires that the police discoverd that the gentleman was heavily armed, so our involvement had been withdrawn! They have asked if we would be available later tonight, possibly for a recovery.
All in all, it’s been quite a busy weekend.