My Weekly Book

Blood, Sweat and Tea: Real Life Adventures in an Inner-City Ambulance - Tom Reynolds

Not part of the plan. I have been hijacked by this book, which I thought I didn’t need to read at all because I had been following the blog. Wrong. Beloved Other Half bought it on an impulse and then read it in about half a day, sequestered in the bathroom most of the time, come to think about it. No, it’s not that sort of book. Unless you get off on some very strange things and I’ve known him for nearly 20 years now… One bad habit he does have, however, is leaving books he has finished reading lying about in the bathroom. Which is how I came to find myself sitting on the toilet reading it (and I can report that it is definitely much more entertaining than the back of the proverbial Vim tin).

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And it’s very, very hard to stop reading once you’ve started, which (probably) accounts for Beloved Other Half’s long absences. As you may guess from the title, Reynolds is an operational member of the London Ambulance Service (LAS) as well as being one of the BNFs of the blogging world, among the earliest and most mainstream of the work bloggers. And, of course, successfully making the transition into print which didn’t harm his reputation one little bit. I thought the format worked just fine on the printed page, almost indistinguishable from books that are written in this style to start with - there are plenty of epistolatory or diary-style works going back centuries, after all. A feature that works particularly well is the insertion of comments and brief updates in the text in a paler ink, allowing the reader to see what was written contemporaneously and how circumstances or the author’s thoughts have changed since. This includes updates on the fates of some of his patients, reunions with colleagues, ironic and referential comments or a look with hindsight on how a particular event affected him - the most striking being the time he had a three-month HIV and hepatitis scare after swallowing infected blood.

Reynolds is blessed with two essentials for good blogging and any other kind of writing - a readable style and interesting subject matter. Any glimpse into a closed world normally beyond public access is a winner with me, and the health service is no exception. And there’s a nice streak of ‘emergency services humour’ - slightly black and cynical, of the sort that keep police and firefighters going in bleak circumstances as well as ambulance personnel. Additionally, his bosses appear to at least tacitly regard him as an asset and not a liability, which is a lot more clear-sighted than many employers manage to be. So he’s got a good story and he tells it grippingly and engagingly. What more could any writer ask for? So, you would imagine that this review should end here. I’ve said what I think, you can make your own minds up, end of story. But no.

One of the most interesting and important aspects of this whole saga is the fact that Reynolds, having turned his freely accessible blog into a book in the first place, then chose to publish this book under a Creative Commons licence which leaves all of us, that’s right, all of us, free to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the work, as long as certain conditions are fulfilled. It is not only available as blog posts but in one coherent piece from the book publisher’s site as a downloadable PDF. You can just turn up and download it for free. Here’s the link. Go on, try it. And, guess what? Rather than adversely affecting book sales Reynolds believes that this is actually stimulating them.

Free culture rules… After all, a blog is quite hard to read while sitting on the loo.

Some links:

• Tom Reynolds’ blog
• Download the book for free here
• LAS official site
• Wikipedia: LAS
• The Guardian: Random Reality Bites
• About Creative Commons
• Publisher’s blurb

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 4th, 2007 at 2:44 pm and is filed under 2007 reading challenge, Reads I recommend. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.