They didn't teach me this at training school..

I was laying face down on the couch, struggling to control the prisoner during my first violent arrest when I became acutely aware that we had never had a role-play quite like this at training school.

Whenever I had arrested and cautioned my prisoner in the classroom, he had submitted relatively quickly. There was the odd shouting and swear word as we progressed further into the course, but once he had been politely told to stop - he did so.

Handcuffing was easy too; the prisoner at training school, who only minutes earlier had been arresting me, fortunately also knew the exact procedure and so helpfully held his arms out in the perfect position so that I could apply the cuffs without too much trauma.

And the Section 32 pat down was even quicker, with the suspect and arresting officer making a joke as a warrant card was pulled out from their trouser pocket. “Oh dear, you’re a police officer? You are in trouble,” we would joke.

But it was during my first real arrest, as I was desperately holding down the man’s legs to prevent him from kicking out at my colleagues that I suddenly realised what an odd job being a police officer is.

Only an hour earlier, I had been inside another house, speaking to the extremely distressed former partner of this man, who had been assaulted by him during a heated argument. I sat there reassuring her that she was safe while at the same time regretting that I sat down on her sofa which was covered with dog hair. In fact, most of it had now been transferred to my trousers and I soon realised why my tutor had so politely declined to sit down.

As I took a brief holding statement from the victim, the dog whose hair was now deposited all over my trousers was humping my leg. I attempted to discreetly nudge it away as his owner continued to sob about the incident earlier that day. Undeterred, the mongrel was not put off and continued crawling all over my leg, shedding more hair as it did so. Again I tried pushing him away but to no avail.

Feeling frustrated, I gently flicked my leg sideways causing him to be thrown across the room a short distance, yelping in fright. I looked up at the victim who had managed to contain her sobs for a second, as she looked between me and her dog, her eyes narrowing.

And only a week before this incident, I was sat in a classroom in my final exam with my classmates- reading questions on police legislation and the law, and ticking one of the four multiple choice answers that were in front of me. “If this is policing,” I thought to myself, “then it’s not actually that hard.”

And just six months before this, I had a job with set hours, no weekend or night work and no dangers of being assaulted or spat at.

Here I was now, rolling around on the floor of a dingy flat, being screamed at and assaulted by a man so angry I actually thought he would explode.

Life as a police officer is certainly strange, and my life, I think, has just begun climbing the dizzy heights of the rollercoaster that I expect this job to be.