Colcannon in progress

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Gumption trap

Have come to the conclusion that in order to get the life that I dream about so frequently (cool bohemian flat, excellent writing job, dog etc) then I need to complete this simple 2,000 word essay entitled: “Research suggests that women and members of ethnic minorities are relatively under- represented in journalism. Why might this be? What effect, if any, does it have on our understanding of what constitutes “news”? Illustrate your answer with reference to current news sources.”

I have even already completed a presentation of this essay question, yet starting to write it seems harder than writing my CV, which was hard because I’m not an ‘anybody’.

I’m in a gumption trap.

Any tips?

PIP implants and the MHRA

Courtesy of Medzooma.com

With breast enhancement figures rising year upon year and the story of cosmetic surgery never being far from the front of people’s media minds, who would have thought that as many as 47,000 women would be given potentially dangerous implants that were left unchecked for years by British regulators?

In late 2011, a frightening and implausible revelation started to leak onto the spectrum of the British media. A woman in France had died from anaplastic large-cell lymphoma, a cancer that was thought to be caused by a ruptured breast implant. This caused an investigation and it was soon revealed that thousands of women from the UK and all around Europe could potentially be affected.

The implants in question were made by Poly Implant Prothèse (PIP), a French company who begun to manufacture them in 1991 and who’s inevitable fate was liquidation by the end of last year. When founded, the company was like any other trying to get off the ground; reliable, safe and stringent with regulations. However, evidence suggests that the founder, Jean-Claude Mas, saw how lucrative it would be to use cheaper non-medical grade silicone to mix with the proper silicone to create the implants, so he adapted his company and threatened his staff into using unsafe ingredients. It was also revealed that PIP were decreasing the amount of ‘dips’ that were used when making the implant to save on the silicone. This meant that the shells of the implants were thinner, more permeable and highly prone to rupture and bleeding.

This came after the PIP implants received a CE (European conformity) mark for their silicone gel breast implants in 2000 via the German Notified Body TUV Rheinland.

According to Adrian Richards, surgical director and a plastic surgeon for Aurora, a private plastic surgery group, the implants that were produced by PIP don’t respond in the way that is typical for breast enlargement patients: “I’ve never, ever seen any other implant other than PIPs rupture in this way. 90% of the ones I remove have a lot of gel bleed, so only one in ten of the women with PIPs that I operate on is okay.”

In the UK these implants, and any other medical technology, were regulated and approved for the market by the Medicine and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). However, there is no evidence that there was ever any follow up checks for the PIP implants, meaning that Mas, and his faulty products, were allowed free reign on the global cosmetic surgery market. Even when complaints of unusual side effects were submitted to the MHRA in 2006 there was not any attention brought to the situation. The regulation agency stand by their view that they were a secondary regulator (bested by European testers), refused to take any responsibly and wouldn’t comment.

For women like Emma Sutton and Chelsea Anderson, however, this response was not enough. Both women have PIP implants; Sutton recieved hers in 2009, and Anderson in 2007 – both within the prime range of 2005 and 2009 when the implants are thought to be the most dangerous. These women, like many other patients that received their implants in the UK, feel let down by the ability of regulators that they thought were there to protect them. “I just took it for granted,” said Sutton, who has suspected ruptured implants “I expected to be looked after to the highest standard because I was paying so much for my treatment. You don’t expect to get any sort of unapproved medical care in the UK.”

“My care was second-to-none, even when I was in critical condition because of a ruptured implant I couldn’t have been any happier with the way that I was looked after,” comments Anderson, who had emergency surgery to remove her implants after they had started to cause her extreme pain: “but I just don’t understand how the MHRA could have been so nonchalant about something that is going to be implanted into people’s bodies. How could they not care?”

Antonia Mariconda, beauty expert and author of ‘The Cosmetic Surgery Companion’ believes the MHRA had a significant number of complaints from surgeons of rupture and gel bleed caused by PIP implants even before 2006, yet chose not to act: “It was only once a French patient died due to suspected complications with her PIP implants that the MHRA chose to do anything, the ridiculous policy is that there has to be substantial complaints from all around Europe in order to get an implant banned in the EU.”

However, Mariconda somewhat agrees with the decision by the NHS not to remove and replace every potentially faulty implant in the women who have been affected. Many of whom cannot afford to get the surgery that they need from their own private clinics: “The women with a clinical need for replacement will be seen to, but these tend to be patients who had their original surgery on the NHS for reconstructive reasons. The women who originally went privately cannot expect the NHS to remove and replace their implants unless they are making them ill – the National Health Service cannot afford to help 40,000 odd women who will then become patients with them for life.”

The MHRA are meant to be the gatekeepers to the British surgery market, whether it be a hip replacement or a breast augmentation, they should be the ones who take responsibly when something goes wrong. However this time they are blaming their lack of regulation on their reliance on PIP to regulate themselves, something that cannot be allowed to happen when there is clearly a problem of profit-over-safety. With the MHRA’s refusal to comment when questioned, it’s easy to assume that they know that they’re in the wrong this time.

Walking out of class: an anger blog

I just did something that I’ve never done before: I stormed (like a grown up, not a toddler) out of a seminar at university.

We’d arrived on time for our 11.30am session with a lecturer in the news room. We went and sat down, logged on, and waited for the lecturer (I’ll call him R) to stop talking to one person in the class. I was checking the BBC website and reading about Shrien Dewani halted extradition to South Africa for the apparent murder of his wife on their honeymoon, and I was talking (obviously quietly) to my friend Nick who was sat next to me about the Panorama that was on BBC 1 last night about the same subject. All I was saying was that Panorama – balanced as they tried to be – had convinced me that the husband was probably guilty. That was it. Probably 50 words. Yet my lecturer who was still only teaching one person in the class and ignoring everyone else told me to stop talking.

1. I am not in secondary school, I was not shouting, I was not talking across the room, I was talking about a current event that might actually be relevant to our….what was it again?… oh our JOURNALISM degree.
2. R was talking to a fellow student who happened to be sat behind me near the back of the class, he was giving them an example of an idea that they could use for their assessment which is obviously fine, as he is the teacher. But the problem was that he expected the other 10 people sat in the class to just sit there, not making a sound. Not moving.
3. Our session started at 11.30 and we were on time, but R was just carrying on from the session before totally oblivious to the fact that the class had changed even though he was reminded.
4. When he told me to be quiet, this was fine. And I was. But when I asked him if we could get on with what we were meant to be doing instead of him focusing all his attention on one person (admittedly that was a bit offhand), he said no. What followed was me trying to understand why he wouldn’t teach us, why he got to change the schedule and do what he wanted when we most certainly aren’t allowed to do that.

R is a notoriously bad teacher. He doesn’t know how to teach. We may be in university and not in school by that does not mean that the whole process of explanation and help goes totally out of the window. You cannot just stand at the front of the class, run through something on some pretty complicated software and then get angry when no one is listening because you went too fast through the example and we all got lost.

I really do hate when people do the maths and say things like “We just paid £60 for that lecture and it was absolute shite,” however I could definitely say that about today. R is the most unqualified, patronising and rude lecture in a very good department. It’s so disappointing that after all the complaints by students (which I know there have been a lot) that nothing has been done about it. I bet that there is a huge amount of highly qualified video specialists who would be excellent lecturers at such a great university like mine.

So I got up and left the room calmly, just because he was being an arse and I don’t think it’s right to have to pay to be talked at by an arse. It may have been the wrong thing to do or maybe it was right, but me sitting there and stirring at his inability would have unleashed all kinds of anger from me after the 90mins session was up! Apparently he felt bad. I’d rather he changed his entire teaching practise (or left…) instead of just feeling bad about making me annoyed.

Anyone that goes to my uni and know’s the identity of R, please don’t post it on here.

Book review: ‘Room’ by Emma Donoghue

Room was bought for my Kindle on Wednesday Feb 29th, and by Saturday March 3rd it was finished. It’s compulsiveness surprised me, never before have I been grabbed by such a poignant and heroic tale of strength and courage.

The book is a narration of 5-year-old Jack’s thoughts, and his view of his world, which he thinks extends no further than the 11×11 foot room that him and his ‘Ma’ are living in. Near the beginning of the book Jack is 4, but when he has a birthday everything changes. His vocal notion he is ‘grown up’ and totally different to how he was when he was 4 prompts his mother to tell him the truth about Outside, and the life that she used to have. She finds herself having to ‘unlie’ to Jack about why they are in Room.

I really don’t want to spoil anything for anyone looking to read the book so here’s the official synopsis:

“To five-year-old-Jack, Room is the world….

It’s where he was born, it’s where he and his Ma eat and sleep and play and learn.  There are endless wonders that let loose Jack’s imagination-the snake under Bed that he constructs out of eggshells, the imaginary world projected through the TV, the coziness of Wardrobe beneath Ma’s clothes, where she tucks him in safely at night, in case Old Nick comes.

Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it’s the prison where she’s been held since she was nineteen-for seven long years.  Through her fierce love for her son, she has created a life for him in that eleven-by-eleven-foot space. But Jack’s curiosity is building alongside her own desperation—and she knows that Room cannot contain either indefinitely….

Told in the inventive, funny, and poignant voice of Jack, Room is a celebration of resilience-and a powerful story of a mother and son whose love lets them survive the impossible.”

Emma Donoghue‘s inspiration for the book was the story of Elizabeth, the woman held captive and abused by her father, Josef Fritzl. When I found this out, before I read the book, I thought that it wouldn’t be possible to write a book that wasn’t pure heartbreak – without any hope. There are moments of this; Ma and Jack scream as loud as they can on some days – Jack thinks that it’s a game; When Jack’s asleep Ma turns Lamp on and off, in the hope that the dim light will project through the skylight and attract attention. However the story being narrated by Jack, who’s naive and thinks that everything that’s not in room is only in TV, makes it endearing and joyful.

How Emma Donoghue imagined Room to be. (Courtesy of http://www.roomthebook.com/inside/)

 

Would they miss you? I hope so…

The man in this story had been dead and undiscovered since 2007, what a hideous thing.

How can you live your life and not make enough of an impact on anyone at all for them to even inquire as to where you are after a week of you not picking up your phone?

It’s really similar to the story of Joyce Carol Vincent who died in her London flat and wasn’t discovered for 3 years. Her story has now been made in to the film “Dreams of a Life“.

It’s frightening to me how people can disappear without anyone noticing.

Courtesy of the BBC

Snowday

Action shot of Nick Spearing chucking a snow ball at Ben Goold’s face.

Taken in Harrow-on-the-Hill.

The UniLad hurricane

I don’t know if it’s the same for everyone of my age, but the majority of the boys in my friendship group could definitely be described as being a bit ‘laddy’. However let me make this clear early on; they would never be so disrespectful and misogynistic as to summon the twitter shit storm that came to be on Tuesday.

If you’re new to this story then take a look at this. The context is not immediately obvious, but that extract was past of a longer ‘article’ entitled ”Sexual Mathematics” with a stunning end paragraph of: ”If the girl you’ve taken for a drink… won’t ‘spread for your head’, think about this mathematical statistic: 85% of rape cases go unreported. That seems to be fairly good odds,” and a hilarious little * which lead to the N.B: “Uni Lad does not condone rape without saying ‘surprise’.”

If you’ve read the above paragraph with anything but detest and malice then you may as well stop reading. Because what’s to follow is my deconstruction of the pathetic lad mentality that seems to be spreading like wildfire around some men.

Let’s start with a story. When I was in year 9 (so, 14 years old) one of my best friends confessed to me that they’d be abused by someone that they’d trusted. It didn’t feel it at the time, but in hindsight I can appreciate what a horrific situation it was for them, and for me as a young child trying to compute the information. You can try your very best to support someone, try to encourage them to report the situation but ultimately there’s nothing that you can say. I know it’s cryptic; but some terrible events and situations that have happened since for this person almost certainly would not have happened if they hadn’t been abused.

This experience makes me feel even more appalled for the deplorable words of UniLad. But even if you have no prior ’experience’ of the situation then I imagine that you are just as sickened. I can imagine how some boys read that ‘article’, laughed and thought nothing more of it because sex has been so trivialised in the lad culture, and that seems somehow acceptable. But the truth is these some of these lads are the kind of boys that do rape, or if not rape, they do abuse and scare slightly-worse-for-wear women (and men) into doing what they want.

I don’t know whether it’s a lack of confidence issue that makes that small demographic of men abuse because they don’t feel like they can talk to a woman and get anywhere. Or where there is a chemical prerequisite in the brains of the men that makes them do it, and frankly I don’t care. But did the author of the article not understand that the idea of rape being dismissed in such a casual mannor kind of “gives permission” to those people who were maybe already thinking about it?

On her blog, @Blonde_M makes a good point: “ I don’t know any men, at university or otherwise, who’d identify with the vulgarity, crassness and downright abhorrence displayed. No one I know would dream of demeaning themselves – and women in general – by saying, believing, or thinking such vile sentiments.” But the problem is that I actually have encountered these ‘lads’, there’s a whole bunch of them in my small home town and from my school. And I’m not talking about the general laddy drunken messes that are my friends, I’m talking about the existence of boys who objectify girls in exactly this way.  Never has it directly been a problem to me, I don’t think any boy would dare say something so chauvinistic to me or any of the amazing females that I know from there.

Purely because if Twitter (I’m convinced) the Unilad website has been taken down, an apology has been issued and the website owner may be facing disciplinary action from Plymouth University (where the site was based). But the damage has probably already been done, not by Unilad, but by a sad culture that has been building in this country for years.

I would run a mile from any man that fit in the ‘severally disconnected lad’ category, and I really hope that all women my age feel the same.

My NHS, let me tell you a story…

Yesterday, Guardian columnist Seumas Milne wrote an excellently candid article with a title and standfirst that caught my eye this morning. “It’s not too late to save the NHS from the barbarians,” shouts Milne (I imagine he shouted it, in a rough ‘Spartaaa’ kind of fashion) in the headline, and this drew me in. What can I say? I love a bit of hyperbole.

Anyway, this article made me think about the NHS in a way that hasn’t happened before… Negatively.

I am incredibly lucky to only have had minimal contact with our health service; I once got my finger caught in a sewing machine, I went to A&E at Dorchester County Hospital, they dosed me up and pulled the needle out and the finger lived on;  and I had something called an adenoid removed when I was a toddler and I don’t miss it (or know what one is), so I imagine that went just as smoothly; and then there’s the odd antibiotic prescription that I get from my local GP. All of these things were available on demand, when I needed them, and until I left 6th form they didn’t cost me a thing. Isn’t that just incredible? And what’s even more incredible is that as a university student, I have never paid income tax in my life. Then when my best friend had a car accident and was airlifted to hospital to have emergency surgery, she paid nothing.

Such an intricate and technical machine of a health service has done well to live for this long, and the majority of me wants it to live on, and flourish. But minority nagging brain cells have gone a bit Torie (opposed to being a bit “meh”) and think that maybe it’s time for a rethink and that privatisation wouldn’t be the worst thing to happen. As an example, I’ve been with my current GP practice for 18 months now, and have probably visited them 7 or 8 times. Only once did I see a doctor that actually worked there, all of the other times the doctors were locum. Maybe it’s because I have been categorised by the practice as being “low priority” because of my age, demographic and health but I can’t help thinking that if there is a lack of permanent ”partner” type GP’s nationally, then the “high priority” patients that really do need regular care are just being fed along the conveyor belt of perfectly adequate but unknown doctors. If the NHS were to privatise, wouldn’t this enable practices to be less target obsessed, less stressful for doctors and therefore have more permanent staff?

But then again, shouldn’t this be able to be solved by distributing the money more sensibly? I’ve been to the new Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham and the place is like a maze, housed in a cruise ship. It cost £545 million and has over 1000 beds, and I’m sure there’s no space for building relationships with patients there. I feel that this hospital was more of a: “hey, look what we can build and look at how big it is!” than something that could be genuinely more beneficial to patients than the several smaller hospitals that could have been built instead. The same goes for the new “super” hospital in Whitechaple, London. The Royal London Hospital cost a massive £1 billion, and I’m sure it’s incredible, and I would have no qualms with being treated there if I needed to be. But this money could have gone on improving the current NHS by helping unstable and relapsing patients, helping to develop cures for anything from diabetes to MS. Or it could have even gone on helping the GP practices in the more deprived areas (where the percentage of locum doctors is highest) to encourage doctors to stay. I know that I don’t know the ins-and-outs of the NHS budget, and I don’t know anything about it compared to what there is to know but my ideas seem to be more logical, to me.

Privatisation of the NHS would mean what, for free-at-point-of-use healthcare? Surely it would meant not a lot for it? Unless the section of income tax that is taken for healthcare at the moment wasn’t cut. In other words, if instead of lowering tax because you paid for healthcare through insurance the government was to keep the tax the same and spend the money on something else. It’s really difficult to put into words what I’m trying to say, but here goes: However much I think privatisation could help to improve UK healthcare, the possibility for these insurance companies it exploite vulnerable people is huge. Should people with self inflicted illnesses (smokers, alcoholics etc) be charged higher premiums? What about people who are in remission from breast cancer? And what about people who can’t afford the insurance which would become mandatory without actually being mandatory? And what about people like me, who barely visit the GP 5 times a year and can’t operate a sewing machine without needing medical attention? And what about contraception, and vulnerable mothers? And what about people to scared to go to the hospital because of how much it might cost them? I have a relative in America who is now in remission from cancer, she has excellent health insurance and lives in one of the best hospital districts - Cleveland, Ohio but she still got a bill every month of $8,000 that had to be claimed for.

I think that it’s important for people to know the true cost of health care. How about if when you visited your GP you received a friendly note attached to your prescription that itemised exactly how much that appointment and medicine cost the NHS, wouldn’t that be a deterrent for people who weigh down the system by constantly demanding prescriptions for minor ailments? Or is that too much of an immoral guilt trip?

“Cameron’s promise to protect the health service was essential to his election and if he is seen to have broken it, the damage will be toxic. To most people in Britain, the NHS is a uniquely popular and progressive institution that touches almost everyone’s lives. To the Tories and their friends it’s a huge untapped business opportunity. But it’s not too late to save it from the barbarians.” This, Milne’s final paragraph, makes his view of the state of the National Healthcare Service obvious, but I don’t just know how he can be so sure…

(Endnote: This blog has been written as a stream-of-consciousness, it probably doesn’t make absolute sense. I’m simply trying to make sense of the situation that we may soon be plunged into. Feedback is great, and I really do encourage it, but please don’t highlight where you think I am categorically wrong. But please do let me know what you think of the situation at hand…)

The Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham. (Photo by John Garghan, via Flickr)

Interview with RAF Flight Lieutenant Douglas Gardner

(This, unfortunately is not the finished version that was submitted to my lecturers. It seems that after a week of writing 2000 words a day my brain had a slight haemorrhage and I forgot to save my final copy. Any feedback would be lovely!)

———-

It is firmly my opinion that people who risk their lives for the sake of others can stand tall on the pedestal of admiration that we mere mortals build from down here on the mainland. Firemen are included in this category, as are police officers, and all types of medics, but the group that will take up most of the space up there on the plinth of respect are the men and women in the armed forces. So you can imagine that I (and my bottled up appreciation) jumped at the chance to interview one of their finest: RAF Flt Lt Doug Gardner.

I thought that walking into the meeting place and being able to recognise him would be easy, I assumed that he would be wearing some kind of distinguishing RAF uniform and would be sitting there, looking battle-hardened and fierce. However after a text of “I’m sat just behind the coffee machine,” I was met with a normal adult, dressed in a Jack Wills gilet and a striped shirt. We shook hands, sat down, and my whole perception of how the interview would go, just shifted.

“Most people aren’t that bothered about what I do, I guess people just don’t know much about it. I got a lot more attention when I did search and rescue even though this job [with the RAF] is harder”

Doug, 31, who’s already been on several tours to Afghanistan, seemed to have his job figured out from the start. In the air cadets from secondary school, which meant he got the opportunity to go flying once or twice a year, and then given a flying sponsorship by a recruitment officer when he was 17, the job of flying aircraft for a living seemed to be obvious and it was handed to him on a plate. “They just dangle it as a carrot to say, ‘look, this is what you could be doing’ and it’s a freebie, you didn’t have to give anything back. I think this process is really important, especially when you consider how long the normal training process is for the RAF. This way you get to try it for a few weeks and then at the end of it you can go ‘It’s not for me’ – which is what a few people ended up doing. But the majority of people were like me, and we just loved it.”

Funding cuts have meant that young people aren’t given opportunities like these any more, even though it’s estimated that the taster course costs the treasury £2000 and full RAF training costs around £2,000,000 before anyone is allowed to leave.

He also obtained an RAF sponsorship whilst studying psychology at Bristol University, receiving money every year and job at the end of it, regardless of his grade. “So you’re ganna give me cash, to guarantee that I do a job that I want to do anyway? Hmmm!” Doug jokes. “It seems crazy now, it seems like I should have been paying them for a job at the end of it. But they do use it selectively to harness it; so if they need more engineers then they’ll throw money at engineers.”

After years of training with the RAF, and with plans to become a fast-jet pilot, Doug was downhearted when he was then told he would be training to fly helicopters: “My plan, which was so naive of me, was go and fly the Harrier [jump jet], go and fly with the Red Arrows for a bit, then generally work until I was the boss! It was my casual plan to do all of the hardest jobs in the RAF. When I was selected to fly helicopters, it was something that I had never thought about before. So I went from a plan going upside down and shooting in jets to then being told I was going to be flying something that I literally knew nothing about. I was pretty upset for a while. But then the more I got into it and the more I started to do the flying the more I had it sold to me.”

My respect for people in Doug’s position will never falter. But as he happily tells tales of his training down-time that involved a caravan that was bought specifically for use as a post-drunken-night-out-hotel, I can’t help think that maybe I’m giving them to much esteem sometimes, because after all they’re just doing their job.

“The people, we do so much together and the banter is massively important. No one in this job is boring either; everyone is a character and everyone is taking the piss out of each other all of the time. In theory, all the crewmen should call me ‘sir’, they only call me sir when they’re taking the piss” Doug describes the best part of his job after I clarified that he was not allowed to say ‘flying the massive helicopters’, that would be too obvious.

“But when it comes to flying,” he continues, “from the start of the planning process to the end of the de-brief everyone changes and everyone puts their game face on. One minute you’re standing with a friend who’s taking the mic out of you hard, and the next he’s assessing you and everything turns professional. High standards at expected and that is understood.”

The tales of training mishaps that happen dwarf any issues that you may have about your driving lessons. Whilst learning to fly his first helicopter, Doug casually describes one particularity impatient instructor as I sat in horror with my hand grasping my mouth: “I learned to fly a squirrel, a single engine helicopter, during my training. The instructor would put his hand on his head to make sure there was no obstruction when you were trying to land, and I remember it was a nightmare trying to land this thing. I remember there was one instructor who said ‘You have 10 seconds to land this, 10 seconds or I’m going to turn the engine off.’ So obviously I immediately started sweating intensely. I got it down to kinda touching but the helicopter started to spin so I lifted back up again. The instructor then finished his count down and turned the engine off. The thing just starts to go down and you end up losing more and more power and then it lands and the instructor goes ‘see you can do it…’ ”. Doug describes this stage of his training as “fun but hard work” and with all the trainees living in a mess together with no outgoings, you can see why.

The training gets completed and the real job begins, but the team spirit and connections that are forged during that time become invaluable when the eduction gets put into practise in situations of war. RAF Odiham, where Doug is based, has 5 operational ‘flights’ that rotate through Afghanistan one by one – with the others left at home either on leave, national standby, international standby or pre-deployment training. Stories from Afghanistan, of such danger and anguish, are so common now that it’s easy to hear them in the media and forget that they involve real servicemen and women. Ask any solider, whether it be from the Army, Navy, or in fact the RAF and they will have a story of war to tell you, and Doug isn’t any different. In Afghanistan he is part of the ‘immediate response team’, this means that there is always a kitted-out chinook helicopter on constant standby, waiting for a call to go and pick casualties or soldiers up. This ‘flying ambulance’ comes complete with a doctor, two paramedics, a nurse and soldiers that are there for protection.

“One afternoon, we were in our tent, taking the piss out of each other and watching DVDs waiting for the phone to ring to tell us where to go. When it did ring, we got given scattered information and were just told to ‘go’. The phone goes down and then you run to the helicopter, the escort which is an Apache helicopter got the same call and so everyone is running out together” Doug recalls, perfectly calmly.

“We flew to somewhere called Haji Alem, which now you could walk around perfectly happily, but at the time it was a very dodgy bit of southern Nad-e-Ali. We were near a village that had a particularly dangerous individual in it. There had been a fire fight going on for 10 hours, and there were a huge amount of casualties. After we had landed it all erupted, we had landed in the middle of the firefight and now we were just a sitting duck. On the field in front of us I could see a load of puffs of dirt, you could see a line of them as the shots were getting closer and closer to the aircraft. Then you hear them ‘bang’ on the side of the helicopter. You’re trying to say encouraging things to the team behind you: ‘How’s it going back there?’ and he’s going: ‘Yeh, I’m working pretty hard…’. But every bit of you wants to scream and shout to get the fuck out of here.”

Still, calm and explaining perfectly clearly, Doug proceeds, “We took of eventually, and obviously just flew over the wrong guys house and the wrong time because we were getting hit from everywhere. I started to ask everyone if they were alright, and checking all the systems to see if any had been taken out and then Ian [the pilot] calmly said to me: ‘I’ve been shot, I’m alright, but I’ve been shot.’ I looked over and I could see that the bullet had hit his helmet and fragmented, and he had a big gash on the side of his face. We lost a load of systems too, those clever computers that make it easy to fly… they all failed. When we had finally landed back in [camp] Bastion, we just looked at each other in disbelief of what had just happened. We walked around the aircraft and it seemed that everybody had a bullet with their name on, all over the armour of the helicopter there were bullet holes, we were all exceptionally lucky.”

There were times during this interview when I started to think that maybe my pedestal of admiration could be lowered, and that with all of the stories of bravery that you hear about there is also the banter and the camaraderie that is created in these job that is unlikely to be found in other occupations. But after Doug’s stories from Afghanistan, and my realisation that every solider has a similar (or maybe more tragic) story to tell, they can firmly go back up onto the pedestal that we have built, and we should try our best to build it even higher.

RAF Chinook (Courtesy of AndyShaun, via Flickr)