The few days in the hotel before we deploy to the desert is always a little odd. Race car drivers don’t keep schedules like normal people. Medics are perfectly used to their kit being around, even when that kit is incongruous to the surroundings.

Which is why, when the DC is on, you might get into the lift and find three Frenchmen taking curry back to their rooms.

Or walk the corridors and find a paramedic locked out of his bedroom, with his spinal board leaned against the wall.

Every year, the day before the event starts properly, we attend the Super Special Stage; a press junket for the racers and those spectators who are interested but not necessarily interested enough to travelmiles into the desert and watch cars go past while sand lodges itself into their groins.

Far nicer to sit in a grandstand and watch them fly by, then go to the mall for an iced tea.

We use this event to familiarise ourselves with the cars, the racers, their protective gear and have a good look at anything that might be a little out of the ordinary. At the staff briefing Sean the CMO asks for a volunteer to check out each car and write a brief description of them, so that if we have to search for them from the air we can provide the aircraft crews with a rough idea as to what they’re looking for. I wave my hand, sure, I’ll do that. I’ve seen the SS stage a bunch of times now, I’m pretty comfortable with the setup.

Arriving at the event I set off with my notepad and pen and it becomes quickly apparent that I am the wrong person for this job, being as I am largely uninterested in motor sports and not au fait with the petrolheads’ lingua franca. I find myself writing down notes such as “Car. White. Four wheels…driven by human…”

I briefly dally with the idea of writing the most effete descriptions I can come up with, giggling to myself at the idea of SAR directives being sent that read “Hard impact for car 42:an adorable little buggy thing in the sweetest pastel shades of mauve and daffodil. Also, the driver has lovely eyes and golly, it looks like it would go dead fast. I’m not about the roll cage though, looks like it might be a bit draughty…still, they’re all wrapped up warm. Maybe they could do with a scarf too…”

But I don’t do that.

Because I’m a professional.

And because Gus and Sean would kill me.

Rolf comes to my rescue “Why not just take a photo of them?”.

Much easier, I hammer through the task in seconds and transfer the files to Sean’s laptop that night in the bar. He’s thrilled with the result, though all credit to Rolf for the brain wave, I just took the photos.

Sean suggests that i do this each year, I counter and suggest we make it a newbie’s job, as it will encourage them to go and look at all the vehicles closely.

I’m well aware that there are a bunch of you out there that get positively sticky at the idea of tires and fuel and stuff. So here, a slideshow of all the zoomy cars with their….ummmm…wheels and that.

The first few days of any Desert Challenge have been, for the past few years, a leisurely affair.

The opening night and first morning?

Are lovely.

We all meet for breakfast, it’s a great opportunity for the new members of the team to get to know everybody.

There are several hours of sitting by the pool to be done, maybe a little sight seeing for those in the group who are unfamiliar with the country.

There’s lunch and beer.

Into and out of this lovely warm fug of sunshine and relaxation and alcohol will pop a concept into your head that runs…”It’s a shame the SAR crewmen never join us…miserable bastards.”

Now?

I get it.

It turns out the reason the crew don’t sit by the pool and drink beers with the medics is because they’re running around like nutters for the preceding days.

There is shit to do.

We arrange and organise equipment, synchronise gps coordinates, have discussions about loading and passengers, schedule and attend briefings

When one meeting ends, we conflab and find that, typically, we need to meet again in 40 minutes to discuss something else.

The crew aren’t drinking by the pool, because they’re busting their asses.

It’s clear after a few days that this will not be the jolly it’s been for the past three years.

This is going to be hard work.

Before I first went out to the desert, three years ago, I met a friend of a friend at a party; turned out he had experience flying Search and Rescue with the Navy and so I quizzed him.

“Is there anything I need to know?”

He taught me to stop thinking of the aircraft and the blades as the same thing, to consider the rotor disc as “a dinner plate balancing on a stick” and then, when I told him I was flying as a medic, he chuckled.

“You need to know that, for all intents and purposes, you’re a passenger. You don’t really need to know much, just concentrate on the patient.”

So for three DCs I’ve diligently sat in the back of the aircraft, doing as I’m told, concentrating on the patient. I’ve always eyed up the SAR Crewman’s role, watching them liasing between the pilot and Rally Control, marvelling at their ability to keep a handle on the entire scene, making management decisions on the fly depending on the torrent of information that flows through them from pilot, medical crew, patients and Control.

My invite to join the SAR side of operations arrived in a typically perfunctory DC style, sent to me and Booker, another medic on the team.

“Chaps…unexpected injury on the team. Need SAR crew. You in?”

I gulped hard, recognising that I was about to embark on something that I knew precisely *fuck all* about.

But in the same breath, recognising that this was an opportunity to step up, to learn some new skills, to take on another role and further responsibility.

“I’m in.”

And then, because I’m gadget boy and like to know I have the tools for the job…

“What do I need?”

“GPS…rigger belt…carabiners…goggles….rescue knife.”

I went shopping.

I read GPS reviews, realising that I needed top of the range consumer, or bottom of the range professional gear. My chosen model was ideal, but for the fact that I couldn’t afford to spend £250 on it. Finding it online for £120 was great news (thankyou Amazon!)

Dismayed to find it came with no map data installed, I hooked it up to the satellites outside my flat and was no more encouraged by it’s navigational intricacies. How to tell where you are and where you’re going, without the curves of OS maps without street names and churches with spires?

My heart hit my boots, how would I ever be able to get around with this thing?

I loaded the waypoint data that Gus had emailed to me and looked at the screen again.

Still no maps, as such, but dozens of waypoints; , hospitals, campsites, airports, rally check points and an ominous “no fly zone” ringed in red.

Looking at the waypoints plotting across an image of otherwise empty terrain I suddenly understood why the maps wouldn’t be important for this work. The desert is such a blank canvas you don’t NEED maps. You just need to be able to navigate to a set of coordinates. And trust that the apparently arbitrary string of numbers you’re sent will translate to a quad rider with a broken leg.

I always carry a rescue knife at work, so that caused me no issue, Booker had kindly offered me a spare pair of goggles. I had only to grab a riggers belt and carabiners.

Now, it turns out that the phrase “riggers belt” can mean two things. It can mean a carpenters belt with pockets and hammer loops for carrying nails, or it can mean what I was sent to purchase, a thick woven nylon belt that slides around your waist, then locks back on itself with a metal D-ring attached.

They’re used for clipping oneself to the floor of the aircraft before you open a door in flight, avoiding the whole “it’s not the fall that kills you, but the sudden stop…” rigmarole if you should suddenly find your

When you pull the d-ring away from your body the buckle bites harder and harder onto itself, effectively the faster you fall the safer you are. Which is great news…if you’re a bit of a fat lad.

The model that Gus had pointed me towards came in at around £50, which is frankly more than I would normally spend on a pair of trousers, let alone a belt.

I was shopping around for a better deal when I had a flash on inspiration.

“You’re buying a piece of kit to stop you from falling to your highly probable demise. Like a crash helmet, it needs to do what it’s designed for. Once.”

I figured if I was sliding across the heli floor towards an open door at Oh-Shit-Hundred-Feet and you said to me “If you pay another tenner? You won’t die.”

This was not a time to be bargain hunting, I went for Gus’ recommendation.

One phone call to tell me she’d had a stroke.

I poured myself a large scotch as my Mum spoke. I’d finished it by the time we hung up.

The second one went down easier and I sat on Dahliah’s bed and sobbed, red faced and sweaty.

The next morning my phone rang too early for social niceities.

I knew as I answered.

But the grief and shock were notable by their absence.

Grief and shock happen when someone is gone.

And she left us when the stroke hit.

Yesterday I sat with my great aunt, the oldest person on earth that I know and soaked up her wisdom and counsel.

With no warning, no run-up as happened with my Mum’s Mum’s illness and death, my Dad’s Mum has weakened and faded. She’d made no secret of how tired she was of hanging around here, she felt she’d outstayed her time.

The stroke feels like a malevolent snapshot, letting us know that we should count our blessings, her final sickness was mercifully brief, quiet and dignified, peaceful.

She wouldn’t have wanted to hang around.

But while last spring’s experiences of sickness and bereavement had me reviewing who I was and the many hats I wore, this one feels more like a giant scoop has been pulled from inside me. Not just the emptiness of mourning, but a feeling like my internal pit-props have been pulled out of me, leaving me wobbly and unstable, unsure of my own footing.

As the generations above leave us behind, there’s a sharp tug on the collar pulling us all up the chain, further up the mountainside of adulthood where you can look down the slopes at where you once were.

I’m not convinced I’m ready to be this high up just yet.

You know, sometimes I think of you guys like my army of winged monkeys.

This kid is the kid of my friend’s friend. He’s selling art on eBay. He wants $12 to spend online.

What say we all go and fire up the bidding war?

I came back from the desert two days ago, shook the sand from my boots and scrubbed it from parts of my body that I needn’t share.

I slept and shared stories, ate Easter lunch with friends and then got pissed with other friends.

I’ve sat around and unpacked and settled into the fug I always feel when I come home, when everything is the same, the sun doesn’t shine and I don’t have a helicopter to fly around in.

-

You know when the phone rings and you see the name and you just *know*?

I knew it wasn’t good.

There was no reason to doubt that my Mum was phoning just to catch up, but her voice confirmed it.

“Is everything ok?”

I heard her breathe.

“No.”

My Nanny, my Dad’s Mum, had a stroke this morning; found in her nursing home when the orderly came in, sunshine and chatter, to wake her up.

She’s alive, but sick…we all know the risks of treatment.

And we know she’d want to be at home.

And we know that she’s very old.

One phone call slapped me back into jangling perspective.

Every time I’ve seen her over the past years I’ve kissed her and known that this might well be the last time we speak.

Last time, before Christmas, she, with delicate concentration, knitted her fingers through mine. She scolded me for not shaving as my beard brushed her cheek. She smiled, faint and gentle, at my faint and gentle jokes.

The last time we spoke.

Have portholes full of sunshine.

They’re lovely.

And beyond the vanishing point?

There’s a baby who’d like you to fuck off with the camera already.

It turns out?

At the point where all lines converge?

There’s a cute baby.