I saw Tom Reynolds give a talk about blogging from work a year or so ago at an NTK event, but I must admit, that I hadn’t really spent much time reading his blog.
Blood, Sweat and Tea is a compendium of entries he’s made over the last couple of years or so, which means that it’s actually all available free on the web. In fact, better than that, you can download the full text of the book from the publishers’ website.
But I still went out and bought a copy of the book after I’d read a few pages online. A properly bound book is still easier to read than pages of A4 from a laser printer.
The author works for the London Ambulance Service, practising in Newham and the surrounding east London area. As such, he’s called on to tend to the needs (or not) of many of life’s less appealing subjects. This he does with humour – there probably isn’t another way of doing it mind you.
The book is written in short chunks – well it is a series of blog entries – with only reader comments missing, although they’re referred to on a few occassions. You certainly learn about life for Ambulance crew, and learn a few things you’d perhaps rather not. TV, it seems, is not really all that accurate – a lot of people end up dying no matter what you do.
My only real criticism of the book is that read in a day or so, it can be a little samey. Reading the blog over a year spaces similar stories out so that you just begin to realise that the same things happen over and over. But reading about them in a book feels a little repetitious. I’d have liked to have read more of his general entries that talk about the sorts of things that can happen rather than a strict diary of that particular day.