Night shifts are a whole world of difference. Often, mostly at weekends, we’d be called into the big city to help the busy city crews. This could work well as we’d get the “real” jobs while the city crews dealt with the usual drunks and alcohol-fuelled brawling.
Sometimes it worked out the other way around. Either way, we all knew that it was going to get busier around closing time. That was when the alcohol seemed to make people braver, and by people, I mean every gender.
The girls were the worst.
Nails, handbags, hair pulling, scratching.
The guys just turned into (what their mashed up minds thought were) He-Men, and they felt the urge to attack anyone who dared look in their direction to show their dominance. On that note, I never understood why these males turned into sobbing messes in the back of the ambulance, some even asking to talk to their mothers (yes, seriously!).
So, you can picture the scene – Saturday night, drunk people everywhere, you could almost smell the aggression in the air, and us….in a white van with very similar markings to a police van…..and wearing very similar high visibility jackets to the police officers. Police officers who seemed quite sparse on the streets.