I’m going to the school in Daschow to learn how to be a Rettungsanitäter, or Emergency Medical Technician. I had to think about this a bit as it means committing spend a month away from the family, but I got a lot of encouragement, not least from several readers of this blog, but the deciding factor was that Beautiful Wife felt it was a good idea. As she’s the one who will have to look after three highly energetic boys while I’m away, I wasn’t about to go and try without her agreement. She reckons that as long as she’s known me, I’ve wanted to jump on passing ambulances to go and help people, so it’s about time I actually learned to do it*. I have a fantastic wife.

I’ll be off for a month in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, known as Meck-Pom, and about as far as you can get in Germany before falling of the north coast and heading for Sweden. The school is in the least populated area of Germany’s least populated state, and the bus service won’t exactly be every ten minutes, so one of the items on the very long list of things to do before I go is fixing up Bike N+1 so I can actually get about**. Thankfully, between working in the bike shop and my habit of embarrassing Beautiful Wife by salvaging bits of scrap bikes, this won’t be too expensive. A small victory for hoarding.

Hopefully, if I have time and money, I’ll be able to race down to see the family for a very short weekend in the middle of the course, then after my first exam I’ll be home for two months, sort of, while I spend four weeks in an accident and emergency ward, and then another month in different ambulances. Of course I now have to apply for these placements, which means more paperwork, and I still have to finish the paperwork for the carpentry apprenticeship, -or more accurately, for the finance for the apprenticeship- and visit the carpentry school and discuss how many lessons I’m expected to attend, and file an amendment to my original application (with paperwork to back it up) because I’m now working part time at the bike shop, and then another amendment (with different paperwork) because I’ll be away throughout May, and…

We’ve made a lot of progress in the last week, I’m trying not to forget that in the face of all these forms…

*Helping people that is, I doubt jumping on passing ambulances is part of the training.

** “Think up a better name for it” is another job, I reckon…

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