As usual, Bob hadn’t a clue that I was taking the mickey and he was grinning and saying something about his ‘helmet’ when our uplifting conversation was interrupted by the row out in the hall.

Screams and shouts from a voice we didn’t recognise.

The 136 Suite is where all those brought in by the police (under Section 136 of the Mental Health Act, hence the imaginative name) are taken to be assessed. It’s a ‘place of safety’ to which the police, having removed them from street/pub/wherever, are obliged to take any individual deemed to be in immediate need of care and control.

Right then, it didn’t seem like a particularly safe place for anyone.

I found out later on that the kid – he couldn’t have been more than seventeen – had been picked up after a member of the public dialled 999, having spotted him dodging cars on the North Circular. God only knows what he was on or what had happened to make him so agitated, but nurses were running around, grim-faced or barking at one another, while the poor bastard was locked inside the suite, shouting and smashing his head against the glass.

Some shit about spiders . . .

For obvious reasons, the staff don’t really appreciate having an audience when there’s business like this going on, so Big Gay Bob and I had the good grace to hang back a bit. As did Ilias, L-Plate and everyone else who’d come out to have a nosy. Donna even stopped walking for a few minutes, which I’d never seen happen before.

Seriously, ‘restrictive intervention’ is not a part of the job that any of the staff enjoy, even if some of them are better suited to it than others. Nobody likes doing it, least of all completing the paperwork and taking part in the compulsory ‘incident debrief’ afterwards, but when the immediate safety of staff or the service-user is threatened and a de-escalation of the situation is required quickly, swift tranquillisation is usually the only option.

Basically, hold the bugger down and jack them full of sedatives.

I watched as Malaika tried to calm the kid down verbally, while George and Marcus discussed how best to approach and restrain him, Femi did the necessary on the computer and Debbie and Mia ran off to prepare the drugs they would need. A poky lorazepam and aripiprazole cocktail.

The rapid-tranq.

It was dead impressive.

They were a seriously well-organised team and, if it hadn’t been for the screaming – I had to cover my ears – and the look of terror on that poor lad’s face, it would almost have been a pleasure to watch.

It made me start to think, though.

‘Come in handy,’ Bob said. ‘A couple of bottles of that tranquilliser stuff. You know, if you didn’t want ladies to put up a fight.’

‘What?’