Product Description

If crime is the sickness, WPC Ellie Bloggs is the cure... Well, she is when she's not inside the nick, flirting with male officers, buying doughnuts for the sergeant and hacking her way through a jungle of emails, forms and government targets.

Of course, in amongst the tea-making, gossip and boyfriend trouble, real work sometimes intrudes. Luckily, as a woman, she can multi-task...switching effortlessly between gobby drunks, angry chavs and the merely bonkers. WPC Bloggs is a real-life policewoman, who occasionally arrests some very naughty people. Diary of an On-Call Girl is her hilarious, despairing dispatch from the front line of modern British lunacy.

WARNING: Contains satire, irony and traces of sarcasm.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3074 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-27
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Customer Reviews

Ironic, sarcastic, depressing and very very funny !
Whilst a MOP myself (Member Of Public) I opened the book with great interest and found it an incredibly addictive read.

I thoroughly recommend it for lots of uses : as something to make you sigh at how ridiculously beaurocratic the U.K. has become, something to help you understand the response you receive if you call 999 because somebody "looked at you funny" or most of all, as something to genuinely make you laugh out loud at totally inappropriate moments !

I found myself sighing and muttering to myself numerous times whilst reading at the sheer stupidity of how our police forces are "managed" according to "targets" these days - this country has gone mad ! At the same time, some parts of the book are just beautifully, exquisitely funny.

I absolutely recommend reading this book - it is educational in a way that the tax paying public of the U.K. desperately need to know about and a thoroughly addictive read at the same time.

If you want to read something that will make you genuinely belly-laugh then you need to buy this book !

Absolutely spot on!
Hilarious book and her description of my previous job of 2 years in civilian support staff land and all the paperwork is so spot on! I only hope more members of the public read this before they whinge about the police, they might realise it really should be government policies and procedures are to blame! Go whinge at Gordon!!!

Brilliantly satirical account of life in the 21st century police
This hysterically funny and horrifyingly plausible book takes the form of a journal covering a few months in the life of a WPC in a town called "Blandmore" in the county of "Blandshire."

I suspect it is not impossible that "Blandshire" might actually be Cumbria. However, the fact that I thought I recognised the county where I live at a couple of points while reading the book may just be an indication of how universal a description it provides of modern policing. Perhaps many other readers were thinking that "WPC Bloggs" must work in the constabulary covering their own police authority area.

I can't think of a better way to indicate the amusing and ironic style of this book than to quote from the foreword:

"Before you turn to page 1, the first thing you need to do is to forget everything you think you know about the police.

You know - the bits where they come out when you call 999, try to find out what's happened and arrest the guilty parties? Forget all that. While you're at it, forget about common sense, too.

Instead, try to imagine a world where the police are run by a group of paranoid, pedantic and politically-correct accountants. On acid. ...

Imagine that half the people who work for the police spend their lives phoning officers asking them to respond to emails asking why they forgot to tick a box on the fifth in a set of a dozen forms relating to an incident where ... [ a drunken four-year old] said a rude word ...

The modern British police is like all that, only much, much madder. ...

I wrote this book after realising ... that people outside the job have absolutely no idea what's going on in the police. ...

Modern policing is a bizarre, twilight zone: one part George Orwell, one part Franz Kafka and one part Trisha.

At times you may find it all a bit confusing. That's because it is. There are various references to police departments that sound unnecessary and pointless. That's because they are. ...

This book comes with a health warning; CONTAINS SATIRE, IRONY, AND TRACES OF SARCASM."

If you can read "Diary of an on-call girl" without laughing, you are Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and I claim my peerage ...