2 o’clock in the morning. Red watch. In the middle of the Atlantic. Pitch dark. Our watch is bored and has trouble to stay awake. The boat, an old herring fisher converted into a sailing ‘yacht’, is in the middle of nowhere, on its way from Halifax to Belfast. Two old men, one from Germany and the other from Canada, and two women from Belfast are on the watch. One of the girls proposes a game to help us getting through these hours of nothing. Let’s all make a confession.

Try this. One night, when you are sitting around a table with your friends, when it’s getting late and everybody getting a bit tired: play this game where each of you has to make a confession.

In our case, on the herring yacht, the two Belfast girls knew each other, at least they had met before. The German and the Canadian were both new. So what did they confess to? The confession of the first girl was so un-interesting that it was immediately forgotten; the Canadian confessed to really like the Bee Gees; the other girl from Belfast confessed to have, one evening, read the test messages on her boy friends phone – and yes, they did split up once she was finished reading; the German had to think quite a bit to come up with something he could confess to. He was tempted to make something up. Nobody on this boat had checked his past; nobody on this boat knew who he was; nobody could check whether his confession was a made-up confession. When they all got on board just a few days ago, nobody had checked their luggage, not even their passports.

He wondered what his watch mates would say if he told them that he was a convicted drug dealer; or, maybe, just a drug dealer (without any convictions). Or a smuggler, a thief, a killer, a terrorist, an agent… It was the perfect moment to make up a whole new life. He could leave everything behind and become somebody else. It’s happening to us every day anyways. We don’t go to bed as the people that we wake up as. But this was different: it could have been a radical change, in a split second.

Sitting our for more than 4 hours. Breathing wiith minimal oxygen by himself. Slowly but surely managing the thrombosis. Good breathing, heart rate, blood pressure. Two friends from Ireland who visited him over the past few days said that they thought he looked much better than a few weeks ago back in Beaumont. It’s difficult to see the small but continuous change when you are with Pádraig all the time. So it was really good to get this feedback from them. – Today, we stayed in the room when the nurses moved Pádraig from the viva-la-Thekla back into his bed. That and the daily evening hygiene and bedding took an hour altogether. Half of that hour, two nurses were working with Pádraig. – I had to think of the pictures the physios in Beaumont had taken of Pádraig bedded correctly for the nurses on the ward (never looked at by them), and the sign they had placed above his bed asking nurses not to pull Pádraig up by his arms but by placing their hands behind his shoulder blades…

Oh, I don’t remember what I confessed to. I didn’t make up a ‘second life’, I remember that much. – I just had to think of this night on the boat, in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, this moment where I could have re-invented myself. In a split second. However, change, especially radical change, is not of your own choosing. It happens to you when you least expect it. A lesson that life had not taught me yet back then.

Today’s German Music Tip
Tokio Hotel, Beichte (2006). One of Germany’s best known ‘rock’ groups with their take on confessions. One of the best known songs of Tokio Hotel is Monsoon, ‘singing in the rain’ from 3m30s which ruins Bill’s hair do. (Imagine Hellmut Hattler playing bass on this song… if even the thought is not too outrageous.)
What’s hot
Red watch on Tecla
What’s cold
Lack of courage to embrace change
The German word/phrase/verse of the day
Ostereier (the first of this year are making an appearance in the German supermarkets)
Ab in die Falle

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