What is Meant To Be Off: A Rescue Swimmer’s Memoir of Ordinary Days That Weren’t about?

Title: Meant To Be Off Subtitle: A Rescue Swimmer’s Memoir of Ordinary Days That Weren’t This book is a front row seat to the kind of job most people only see when something has already gone very wrong. It is told from my point of view, in the language we actually use, with the kind of honesty that tends to come out in the small hours of the morning rather than in tidy press releases. At its heart, it is about the strange life of a rescue swimmer who is forever being pulled from the ordinary into the unacceptable, often at the exact moment you thought you were safe on your day off. The opening chapter starts as unglamorously as possible: I am on the toilet, doom scrolling, convinced this is one of those rare, unscheduled days when work lives on someone else’s phone for once. The call that comes in is blunt. They are short a rescue swimmer. Suddenly my day off is over and a job that is already “developing” is about to become mine. A vessel has lost power and its anchor, one person on board, drifting in rough weather and being pushed toward rocks. The sea state is that particular kind of ugly that turns a “should be fine” task into something that can kill people who know what they are doing. That first story sets the tone for everything that follows. Each chapter is a self‑contained mission from my career, written as a short, sharp vignette that drops you straight into the moment. You feel how quickly things move from theoretical to real, how the aircraft smells of gear and fuel, how the headset compresses your whole world down to a few voices and a lot of unspoken trust. You also see the quiet ridiculousness threaded through it all. There is humour in the timing, in the awkwardness of a fully grown adult swinging under a helicopter like a “low‑budget version” of a music video stunt, wondering when exactly this became a normal part of going to work. The story that anchors the book’s concept, and lends it its title, walks you step by step through one particular rescue that could have gone very differently. We make radio contact with the casualty on the way out. He can see us. We cannot see him. The aircraft is overhead, the sea is white and messy, and we ask him to “talk us in.” There is a pause while he works out how to do that with a helicopter bearing down on him and waves lifting his whole world. Then he tells us, as calmly as he can, that we are on his right. It sounds trivial, but when you are blind in the aircraft and flying toward rocks with someone’s life waiting in the middle, those small, unsure sentences matter a lot. The first plan is textbook. Get over the vessel, take the winch, put me down on the deck, get him hooked on, and lift him off. The problem is that the sea has not read the textbook. The boat is rolling hard and unpredictably, so the pilot and the crewman are fighting to keep us somewhere usable. That fight blows down the wire, straight into my harness. What should be a controlled descent becomes a growing sideways swing, the kind where you know, in your gut, that it is not going to settle. There is a strange, suspended moment in which you find yourself waiting to hear the words “Abort, fly away” and already bracing for the sudden climb while your brain does the maths on how close you just were to being slammed into the boat or dragged under it. We reset and try again, because that is what the job often is: the same dangerous problem with slightly different numbers. The second attempt is closer. I can feel the boat’s presence in the air below me, feel the timing almost line up. For a heartbeat, I am close enough to make contact, and then the sea takes that away. The swing builds again, the angles go bad again, and the same instruction comes across the intercom. Abort. Fly away. Each failed attempt is not just a technical issue. It is another reminder that the margins we work in are thin, that we can do everything right and still not get the conditions we need. It is also a reminder that the voice saying “abort” is the one keeping me alive, and that to do this work you have to trust your crew fully, even when every part of you is desperate to push through and just get it done. The plan changes. If I cannot safely go down onto the vessel from above, I will go into the sea behind it. A quick helmet change, fins on, a short, wordless shift in mindset. The winch becomes a ride into water that looks as hostile as it feels. The book lingers here, in the discomfort and effort of that swim up to a boat that is lurching and sliding away from you every few seconds. From the outside, “swim up to the stern and get onboard” sounds simple. From inside my mask, with breaking waves picking you up and dropping you while you try to time that last pull toward metal and fiberglass, it feels like a tightrope. Get it wrong and you either never get a proper hand on the boat at all, or you meet it at exactly the wrong moment and end up hurt or under it. These are the kinds of details the book stays with: the way your shoulders burn when you haul yourself onto the stern and immediately have to act like you are not already tired; the look on someone’s face when you finally stand in front of them and they realise their night of drifting might actually end; the quiet thought in the back of your mind that this has all happened while your mates are still at home on the sofa, convinced that “off” means off. Once I am onboard, things speed up again. We move to a safer position, away from the worst of the rocks and the unpredictable roll. The high line comes down from the aircraft and I pull the hook in, going through the small ritual of getting both of us set for the lift. There is always an awkward pocket of time right before the hoist takes our weight, where you are clipped together with a stranger, both trying not to look too nervous, both very aware of how much metal, cable and human judgment is about to decide whether you go up clean or get dragged or snagged on something no one spotted. The hoist bites, we stumble as the tension comes on, and then the boat and the water fall away. It is a simple, physical transition that, in the book, carries a lot of emotional weight. For him, it is the first time in hours that the sea has not had direct access to his future. For me, it is the brief relief of knowing that the worst‑case scenarios for this particular job have just reduced in number. The chapters do not end when the dramatic part does. Back in the cabin, the noise of the rotors is just loud enough to make long conversations inconvenient, just quiet enough for you to be alone in your head. The rescued man sits at the window and watches his boat drift away, smaller and smaller. It was not much, but it was his, and in the space of an hour or two it has gone from being his home and problem to just another object the sea can do what it wants with. That image sticks with me long after we land. So does the strange emotional split: for him, this flight is probably pure relief; for us, it is another job done on a day we were meant to be doing absolutely nothing. Across the book, that “day off” irony keeps resurfacing. Sometimes I am pulled from a quiet family moment, sometimes from sleep, sometimes from the pointless comfort of scrolling my phone. The point is not that I am a martyr. It is that the line between normal life and life‑or‑death work is thinner in this job than most people ever feel. One moment you are thinking about groceries or football scores, the next you are clipping into a winch while a crewman cons you out over a deck, trusting their voice more than your own sense of balance. The humour comes from that whiplash, from the absurd positions you find yourself in, and from the small, dry comments traded on intercoms and in cabins to keep the fear in its box. The memoir does not shy away from how dangerous these jobs are, but it mostly shows it rather than preaching about it. You see it in the aborted winches, the near‑misses, the uncooperative physics of rough seas and small boats, in the fact that we have to be willing to scrap a plan even after all the effort of getting there. You see it in how tightly we cling to procedure not because we are rule‑bound, but because those rules were written in someone else’s blood. You also see it in the way we lean on each other. The trust in the pilot who calls the abort when my view is nothing but swinging grey and white. The trust in the crewman conning me down, talking me around antennas and railings with calm instructions while his own world is just a door, a winch head and a whole lot of risk. Each chapter will follow that same core approach: a single mission, told cleanly from the inside out. The tone stays grounded in reality, using plain language and a bit of salt, with pockets of inner monologue where you hear the quiet calculations and inappropriate jokes that run alongside the procedures. Some stories are about people like the lone sailor on the drifting boat, who have had days to think about how bad this might get. Others will be about shorter, sharper incidents where everything goes from normal to unacceptable in minutes. Together, they build a picture of what it actually feels like to be the one sent out when things have already gone wrong, to be the person on the end of the wire or in the water who is meant to be the solution, even when the sea, the weather and the clock are arguing the opposite. “Meant To Be Off” is not a technical manual, although there is enough accurate jargon threaded through to give the work a spine of authenticity and let readers feel the difference between theory and practice. It is not a heroic tale in the usual sense either. It is a collection of honest accounts about a job that demands you be ready to walk into dangerous, uncontrolled situations, often from a standing start of complete ordinariness. It shows how you learn to live with that, how you find humour in ugly moments, how you rely on your crew, and how, once the aircraft is back in the hangar and the kit is stowed, you still have to go home, sit on the same sofa as everyone else, and pretend this is just another normal day.

This book is a memoir of the first twenty years I spent doing a job that never quite looks the way people think it does. On paper, it is a career that moves in a straight line: starting on exposed bits of coastline with Coastguard, then into ambulance work, then specialist HART teams, then HEMS, and finally flying as a critical care flight paramedic over a very different stretch of ocean in New Zealand. In reality, it is a messier, more human story, told one callout at a time.

Across twelve chapters, the book traces that journey through individual jobs rather than formal milestones. Each chapter stands alone as a rescue, a search, or a scene, but together they build a picture of what it actually feels like to keep turning up when things have already gone wrong for someone else. The common thread is simple: you arrive, try to work out what is going on, and then do whatever you realistically can. Sometimes that leads to clean saves and grateful families. Sometimes it does not. Often, it leads somewhere in between.

The opening chapters sit on the coast, where the work looks simple from far away and becomes anything but once you are in it. Short, sharp water rescues that begin as “we’ll just go and have a look” drift into long multi‑day searches where the urgency stretches and the mission quietly shifts from rescue to recovery. Readers see how you gradually learn to “read” the water, how tide, wind, light, and coastline shape decide more than you do, and how searching is as much about time as it is about distance. You are not just tracking people; you are tracking the moment where hope changes its name but no one wants to say so out loud.

From there, the book moves inland and into the back of ambulances. Those chapters cover the routine calls that never feel routine to the people in the room, and the first cardiac arrests that quietly stamp themselves on your memory. A job that starts as “nothing dramatic” still ends with you standing in someone’s front room counting compressions, pretending you’re more certain than you really are. You begin to understand that outcomes are not neat, that “we did everything” does not always lead where you hope, and that sometimes the biggest shift is internal: you walk out of a house a slightly different version of yourself than the one who walked in.

The HART sections show what happens when the same job is turned up a notch. Here the scenes are stranger and the surroundings less forgiving: industrial estates, derelict laundries, bridges, and cliffs. One chapter revolves around a “full team deployment” to “three teenagers stuck in a tumble dryer” and reveals how an apparently absurd call can still require all the professionalism and calm you would bring to a genuine catastrophe. Another takes place on a bridge with a man who has changed his mind about jumping but now cannot feel his legs, leaving you clipped into a height‑safety system while you have an oddly normal conversation in a very abnormal position.

Running under the HART stories is a very specific kind of humour and team culture. Those chapters open up the reality behind the “professional” badge: floor cleaners ridden like rodeo bulls, kit boxes turned into makeshift transport, lockers mysteriously relocated to inaccessible places, and showers that are rarely private. The book is honest about how ridiculous some of this looks from the outside, and just as honest about why it matters. You see how the constant teasing, daft bets, and minor acts of sabotage are not just entertainment, but the background work of learning who you are trusting with your life. It is easier to lean on someone at the edge of a cliff or under a lorry if you have already watched them fall off a floor cleaner and get back up laughing.

The HEMS chapters raise the altitude and the stakes. Your first proper day is not a gentle introduction but a rapid sequence of a house‑fire cardiac arrest followed by a child trapped beneath a lorry. You are suddenly expected to lead, to intubate, to decide, while the rotor wash is still settling and the clock has not paused out of respect for your learning curve. The work feels familiar and completely new at the same time. A later chapter follows you into firearms jobs in large, quiet houses where two people with gunshot wounds are somehow both still alive, and the medicine has to sit alongside the uncomfortable knowledge of what has happened in that room.

New Zealand shifts the backdrop but not the core of the job. Those chapters take the reader out over long stretches of open water where there is no road beneath you, only range, fuel calculations, and time. A cardiac arrest on a fishing vessel more than a hundred miles offshore forces you to strip the aircraft and your thinking down to essentials. You wait on the ground for the boat to sail into range, an experience that feels completely at odds with every “fast response” reflex you learned in the UK. When you finally reach the vessel, are winched onto deck, and find a young man who now has a pulse because a crew of fishermen followed instructions to the letter, the distance between the systems feels very small and very large all at once.

Threaded through the operational detail is a quieter story about mental health and the emotional grain of the work. One chapter centres on a night‑time visit to a young woman in crisis who will only agree to hospital if one of you wears a filthy mascot‑style teddy bear head, and how that kind of negotiation sits alongside the more formal parts of pre‑hospital care. Another follows two height jobs: one where a man on a bridge ends up with nothing worse than numb legs and a long, awkward ride down on a fire service ladder, and another where a fall from height ends in on‑scene recognition that there is nothing meaningful left to do, except manage those last minutes with as much dignity as possible.

Near the end of the book, the tempo changes again with the arrival of COVID. Those chapters do not try to retell the pandemic as a grand narrative. Instead, they stay tight to what it looked and felt like from the cab: the day you realised the “category 4 infectious disease” training might actually matter, the first transfers in full Level 4 PPE, the strange quiet on the roads when everyone was suddenly too scared to call for help, and the long, surprisingly hard conversations trying to convince people with obvious heart attacks to come to hospital. The focus stays on the lived texture of those shifts, rather than the policy language that surrounded them.

Not every story in the book lands in tragedy or farce. Some of the most powerful chapters are about the rare occasions where everything lines up. One man who has more than a dozen shocks during an out‑of‑hospital cardiac arrest walks into the station months later with his family and a smile, and you have to hold the two versions of him in your head at once: the body on the floor and the grandfather who is now very much alive. Those small visits do not erase the other jobs, but they put a thumb on the scale in the opposite direction and remind you why the repetition and training matter.

The closing chapter, “You Get Used To It,” draws together what all of these scattered scenes have done to a life. It talks plainly about how you learn to answer “yeah, not bad” when someone asks about your day, even when it has contained things they will never see. It looks at the way your sense of risk shifts, how supermarket aisles become places where old jobs suddenly replay, and how sleep mostly works until it occasionally does not. It does not parade trauma or offer tidy lessons. Instead, it tries to be honest about the quiet, gradual ways the job reshapes you, and about the fact that you learn to live with it because the alternative is not doing the work at all.

Overall, We’ll Just Go and Have a Look is not a catalogue of heroics or a training manual. It is a collection of true‑to‑feeling stories about what it is like to be the person kneeling on a floor, clipped into a rope, or hanging under a helicopter, trying to make a series of imperfect decisions in places that were ordinary until, for someone, they suddenly were not. The book aims to let readers feel the mix of absurdity, fear, competence, and quiet humour that runs through this kind of work, without cleaning it up into something more dramatic or more noble than it really is.

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Meant To Be Off: A Rescue Swimmer’s Memoir of Ordinary Days That Weren’t

Keep reading

Meant To Be Off: A Rescue Swimmer’s Memoir of Ordinary Days That Weren’t