This was not a very busy week on The Flying Crane with only 5 jobs although these were spread out over all 4 nights. All were evening jobs with the latest seeing me home at 11pm.

Monday saw me go to Chippenham birthing unit for the first run to the Royal United Hospital (RUH) Pathology Laboratory in Bath, and then towards the other end of the patch to Frome Community Hospital and returning back to the RUH.

Tuesday saw a new front tyre being fitted as the old one had reached its legal minimum and was badly worn making for a bumpy ride. However, riding on the new tyre had to wait. On Tuesday evening when the call came in just before 9pm to go to Paulton, I got all my motorcycle kit on and opened the front door to leave to be confronted by patchy fog. Now in my mind, fog and motorcycles do not go well together so a quick change of clothes and I did the run in the car. A wise decision as there was fog for about half the trip and on returning home from the RUH, the fog was very thick with a safe speed of about 30mph on a National Speed Limit road.

Wednesday saw me visiting one of the ‘old faithfuls’ again, Frome Community Hospital.

My experience is that jobs in this area tend to be samples of various types from other units in the area being transported to the RUH, so it made a change on Thursday evening to take patients notes away from the RUH Acute Stroke Unit to Beech Ward at Chippenham, which is also a stroke ward. Now the other slightly out of the ordinary thing was that on Thursday evening, I seemed to find a lot of ambulances to follow for some distance before it was safe to overtake. It should be said that none of them were on blue light runs so we weren’t having a ‘blues and twos’ race! Just before reaching home on my last run, one of the headlight bulbs failed. Fortunately the R1200RT has twin dipped headlights with a separate main beam bulb.

Fortunately the week stayed almost dry unlike my rota 3 weeks ago where I got absolutely drenched. Hopefully reproofing my ‘waterproof’ trousers has been successful.

Mileage covered was 350 miles.