I live near a hospital and I’ve worked from home for most of a decade, so I hear ambulances go past many times a day, and I consider it part of my mission to pray for all of them. I talked about this in Ben-Them 1, last year, and how it had become second nature to pause, and spoken or silently pray: ‘God, protect them, aid them, ease their fear and pain. Get them where they need to go. Grant them peace and relief and a knowledge of your aid and your love’. The prayer comes round enough that I hope it’s not purely mechanical. I endeavour to mean it. Communication, not just habit. Claudius, in Hamlet says ‘My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go’. I don’t worry too much about whether I’m praying in the right attitude, but I worry slightly. Better to give that some thought than none at all.

When I first moved in my prayers were very practical. Keep them from bleeding out. Get them to the expert asap. That’s still a major factor in the prayers, but a lot more of it is, don’t let them despair. Don’t let them be traumatised. Don’t let them cry out in desperation and go without an answer. I worry about lasting trauma, something which can under-run a life and creep up with upset to ruin otherwise peaceful days. Perhaps linked, but very different - when I make stories, music, video and so on these days I worry more about trauma. About triggering old horrors or opening old wounds. What I make is less cruel, and with less shock value now. I’ve met enough people who are held down or haunted by past traumatic events that I pray for protection against exactly that. Half those ambulances are bearing somebody, but the other half are going to someone who is desperate, and probably experiencing one of the worst days of their life.

I got my first trip in an ambulance recently, and despite breaking my collarbone I was exceedingly lucky in almost every regard. It turns out praying for ambulances and their quarry is possible from the inside too. I always hear the ambulances tearing along the road and imagine a sense of urgency, but as it turned out I got a long ride and a long prayer. I fell out of the tree at about 3.30. The ambulance was called by 3.40. I was on the ground at least an hour before the paramedics came, and when they arrived it was all tests to see if my body was still functioning. They did eyes following the light, all the classic ASMR stuff! Then summoned yet more paramedics to get me down the tricky steps from my garden on a stretcher. I was in the ambulance by 6 and in the hospital by 8. The hospital is only 2 kilometres away - literally on my road, which is long - but there was a queue of ambulances, and my condition didn’t bump me up the list.

People in ambulances need plenty of prayer, but they may well not be perishing. In the ambulance, I wasn’t despairing, I was no longer worried for my life. I was bored and agitated and I desperately needed a wee. It left me in the worst mood of the day, as they’d strapped me to a stretcher, and the stretcher was less comfortable than my knackered shoulder. Dear listener, heed my advice: if you’re ever going to fall out of a tree, go to the toilet *first*.

I was fortunate that my impatience was able to outweigh physical damage. I was fortunate an ambulance was available at all! A week earlier there had been an ambulance strike, and I had deliberately not gone up the tree that day, reasoning ‘I doubt I’d fall out, but I’m not a fool’. People in ambulances need care, peace and action. People waiting for ambulances, doubly so, and hope during the wait, a time when it must be easy to feel forsaken, and have that pain and loss burned into your brain.

The other thing that was extremely apparent was that the NHS needs more funding, more people, more hospital staff. I suspect they have enough ambulances, but they bottleneck at the hospital and have to wait in queues, rather than heading off to their next victims. The doctors, nurses and everyone else got us through the depths of covid and we clapped, but they’ve been worked to the point that we’re losing them, with budget slashes having exactly the same effect. I was incredibly fortunate compared to most ambulance-passengers, but these delays definitely have a price in lives, and give people time to develop a crust of trauma that can be worse than the injury. This is definitely a point for prayer, and for practical action.

I'm glad the strikers struck, and I very much support them in this. I desperately hope there's some positive response, because the current situation is unsustainable.