Roll over Nelly. You’re off the crash team.

It’s April.  It’s time for our annual training update for life support .  No year is complete without some words to commemorate this auspicious day in our calendar.

Training today was an all day affair.  Arriving at half 8 we were greeted with coffee and the inevitable plethora forms and registers to fill in.  After some initial lectures, we were led to a room filled with trolleys and equipment; bits of tubing and syringes and some intimidating looking kit with screen and dials; but there, lying on the couch, was the reassuring form of an old friend – Resuss Annie.  Or was it?  For this was no ordinary Annie.  She had a tongue and eyelids.  And arms!  And (most miraculous of all) a pulse.  This was Annie-Plus, a demigod among plastic manikins; a breathing, pulsating, comatose-able titan of androgynous morphology with her own heart trace.

Our game has been upped and expectations raised.  The training was a bit like basic life support except for one important difference.  In basic life support training the assessor watches you doing your compressions for about 5 minutes before finally, and much to your sweaty relief, stops you and says, “Ok, relax.  Help has arrived.”  Well, apparently now we’re nearly qualified we’re expected to be the help which has so conveniently turned up.

And apparently I’ve been doing it all wrong!  Nelly the Elephant, the song I’ve been singing for the past five years, is, I learnt today, too slow.  The song I should have been singing is, rather more appropriately, ‘Staying Alive’ by the Bee Gees.

Sorry Nelly.