Risk Assessments, Incompetents & Irritable Bowels

Filing proved to be beyond James. I bloody well can't believe it. What kind of fuckw*t supposedly-A* pupil thinks that you only file by the first letter of someone's name? It's going to take months to find anything now. I ring The Boss and demand he finds James something totally harmless to do, so Andrew gives him a "special project." Something to do with finding out how many teenage pregnancies there have been in Northwick in the last ten years. Of course, James thinks this will gain him access to my computer, but I send him to the library instead. At least they've got more than one loo.

I tell him to be back in time for a meeting I've arranged with a local manager from the Mental Health Trust, on the basis that this will be educational. He looks distinctly unenthusiastic, and becomes more so as the meeting progresses. I am trying to establish exactly the point at which our duty to protect staff and others would take precedence over our duty of confidentiality. Am a bit astonished to discover that several of the constituents Greg and I deem the most dangerous have already been the subjects of a number of Multi-Agency Meetings and risk assessments, none of which we have been included in. We deal with these nutters daily, and without any security! It is agreed that we will be faxed copies of the relevant risk assessments this afternoon - on a "need to know" basis - and we'll be invited to attend the meetings in future. Greg and I are well-pleased at this development, but James looks decidedly pale.

I'm a little pale myself after I read the risk assessments. Amazing how many of our usual suspects have convictions for ABH, are known to carry weapons, and considered to pose a high risk to staff who have to deal with them. One of them even isn't even allowed to attend a normal doctor's surgery, but has to go to a secure facility which has an armed guard! I'm not sure I wouldn't rather have remained in blissful ignorance, relying instead on The Twilight Zone theme to protect me.

The only useful information is a list of those things which are known to trigger certain constituents to commit acts of violence. In Mr Meeeeurghn's case, this is almost anything, but I didn't know about Mr Humphries. A paranoid schizophrenic with a persecution complex, I already knew that he considered that all Government agencies spied on him. What I didn't know was that he believes that other people's unconscious tics are codes to alert the authorities and switch on surveillance. It's only by the grace of God that Greg and I haven't ever scratched our noses, fiddled with a stray hair, or chewed the end of a pen while talking to the man! I'm starting to think that a degree in Psychology would have been more useful than one in Politics.

James says he feels unwell, and that his irritable bowel syndrome is causing him a problem, so I let him go home early. I'm not entirely sure about his sanity, if I'm honest.

Greg wants us to go and get drunk, but I really need an early night. Haven't slept properly since Max's German trip. He's in a really bad mood this evening, seemingly because Connie's got an interview for a job at a local call-centre in their IT department. He overhears her telling a friend that it "isn't brilliant money" and doesn't speak to any of us for the rest of the night. (Apart from Max, I'm the only one who knows that it is barely £1,000 a year less than he now earns.) Johnny and I inhabit very different worlds - and yet I was the one that our class voted "most likely to succeed."