One night on the Late Late Show, some mad man said he was going to get water and plastic bottles, fill the plastic bottles with the water, and then sell the bottled water. The whole country went hysterical with laughter. It went on for the whole night, and all of the following week. Did you hear the man on the Late Late saying that is going to sell bottled water? Would you ever…! Who on earth would pay for bottled water when you just had to open the tap to get the same stuff for free?

A few year later on, supermarkets have isles full of water, water from Ireland, from Italy, from France, from I don’t know where. And people buy it. A lot. Someone had done some magic.

For me, this is a perfect example of how we are working hard, to earn as much money as possible, which we will then spend on stuff that we could get for free – which renders a lot of our money and all the time we spend at work to earn it, pretty useless. What if we decided to work less, earn less money, and only buy what is not free and less of it. It would probably bring down the economy, but it would very likely make us happier people.

Pádraig’s friends told me a few things about him recently which I had heard about before but which had not really registered: apparently, he is the only person they know (or just one of very few) who would use a disposable camera. He also never wanted a smartphone (a phone is a phone and not a computer). He is, they said, someone who had an opinion of his own about things, a sense of right or wrong, and it didn’t matter whether that was popular or not. Try to make sense out of this: if you didn’t know Pádraig, you’d think they were talking about a person from the ‘old’ school, not a fun-loving, full of energy being, singing and dancing a 23-year old.

When I went into Pádraig’s room today, it smelt really nice but I couldn’t make out what it was…

He was good today, struggling his way through long days, hard work with the therapists, sitting in the viva-la-Thekla with bare legs – it’s so warm here. The sky is blue, the first buds are out, there is summer in the air. Voices are coming up into his room from a downstairs balcony. Trains rush by in the distance, the S1 into town in one, and to the airport into the other direction. Birds are singing. One thing he was doing really really well today was swallowing – and while this doesn’t sound very impressive, if he manages to swallow well, he’ll be able to get rid of the tracheostomy, definitely.

Later it turned out that, in the morning, therapists had turned Pádraig onto his stomach for about 20 minutes or half an hour, yet another first, and Pádraig being the tall man he is, not so easy to do! But lying on your stomach should stimulate your swallowing. With Pádraig it seems to have done the trick!

Another really nice thing today was that the nurse that has been looking after him more than anyone else lately, had tried to stimulate his sense of smell with some different oils. Amazingly, the one he reacted to most (and the one I had smelled when I came into the room) was lavender – which is not just Pat’s but was also Pat’s mother’s favourite flower and smell. Someone had done some magic today.

Tonight, instead of the Today’s German Music Tip – a clip for our non-Irish-based friends, and our younger friends, who have never seen the ‘real’ Late Late Show, the worlds longest running chat show: the intro.

What’s hot
Water
What’s cold
Bottled water
The German word/phrase/verse of the day
Mensch Meier, das ist ja ‘n Ding!

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