After finishing as a director of the BBU (British Biathlon Union) I missed the involvement with the British team and equally my work contracts had changed so that most of the time I worked from home. I missed team work and being part of a team that gets things done. I had several friends that were in the Fire Brigade in Aviemore and one of them suggested that I should join. After a bit of thought I decided it was a good idea and went for an interview and was successful.

So what is a retained fire fighter? A retained fire fighter is effectively a part time fire fighter. We train once a week in the evening and carry a pager, whenever the pager goes off we have to get to the station ASAP (our station has a very fast response time normally no more than 2 mins) and then we are off. The difference between us and a full time crew is that we are effectively on call 24hrs a day almost every day of the year. If we leave the village for anything we have to book off as unavailable and we are allowed a set number of days leave each year.

Because the area we cover is very rural it is very different than the traditional role of a full time fire fighter. To say the area we cover is rural is a bit of an understatement! Highlands and Islands Fire and Rescue Service area covers an area the same size of Belgium and only has 1 full time fire station in Inverness (35mins away from our station). Our area is very different to an urban environment where a large amount of call outs are to house fires. The majority of our call outs are to Road Traffic Collisions (RTCs) and forest or heath fires with relatively few house fires. That said it does not make our job any easier cutting people out of cars is a extremely skilled job and fighting a forest or heath fire is tough, physical work. In just over the 2 years that I have been in the fire service I have responded to over 230 call outs, 12 house fires, 32 car crashes, and 20 heath or forest fires and 1 child stuck in railings!