Vinnie Jones is here to inject the namby-pamby world of first aid with a dose of homophobic machismo
I crouched over the man-sized dummy and put my lips to its latex mouth. I was in the Brownies, learning mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. How was I to know, aged seven, that this was to be the model for my love life in the decades to come?
It turns out my first aid training was for nothing. The British Heart Foundation now recommends that, instead of mouth-to-mouth, a better revival technique is chest compression. For their promotional video they've enlisted angry, nut-crunching footballer turned actor (specialising in angry, nut-crunching roles) Vinnie Jones. Jones warns against mouth-to-mouth by saying "no kissing" because "you only kiss your missus", although the gazillions of straight women and gay men in the world don't. Instead, we should go for "hard CPR".
That's what the namby-pamby world of first aid needs: a dose of homophobic machismo. As ever with the homo-baiting machos, there's a lot of psychosexual tension under the surface. Fittingly, Jones suggests doing CPR in time to the Bee Gees' Staying Alive, one of the gayest songs ever.
The biggest first aid hero I ever saw was no wideboy. Imagine: Wood Green high street, the rough end. A six-foot-three skinhead with full face and neck tattoos struts down the street, hollering. Suddenly he stops, goes pink and cross-eyed, spins around, collapses and begins having a crunching, painful, pavement-slamming epileptic fit. No one helps, including me. A lithe woman in her 70s unhesitatingly darts forward, kneels down, cradles the man's head in her lap, turns him on his side, checks his pulse and talks him through it, crooning "Easy, easy," while calling for an ambulance. The man comes around, red, shaking and tearful with shock. The woman's disappeared into the crowd. Beat that, Vinnie.