I got up at 5.30 this morning. Funny that I managed to do this – I had tried for at least a week before and had always miserably failed. The plan had been to get run around the block just before breakfast, and before the heat. Man makes plans and God laughs (he must have had a great time last week, laughing at my plans). Today was different.

I got up at 5.30 this morning to go for a drive, this time not north but south, to see my mother who was 91 today. A bit more than a year ago, she had a stroke and is now paralysed on her right side. She couldn’t live on on her own anymore and had to move into a home.

I got up at 5.30 this morning to get to see her and leave before the guests were to arrive at the party in her honour my sister had organised.

During the three hour drive, I listened to the radio, and learned that it was this coming August 70 years ago that the population of Warsaw started the biggest uprising anybody anywhere had ever attempted against the occupying Nazis. Following this uprising, the Germans killed 200,000 people in Warsaw and destroyed most of the city: block by block, they blew up the buildings until nothing was left. 70 years ago, my mother was 21. I asked her whether she remembered. She said that, at the time, she had been in the south of France working as a nurse and substitute mother for young officers many of whom died on her ward, and consoling those U-Boot crews who did not want to go to see anymore because they knew that they had no chance of returning alive. Now, she is in this nursing home where she was trying (most of the time unsuccessfully) to get the intention of the staff because she wanted to introduce them to her youngest child, her only son. Then she asked me, using slightly different words, whether I knew what it meant to live in a place like the one she is living in. I don’t want my mother to be there but very sadly really do not have much to offer as a viable alternative. But I know and will make sure that Pádraig will not live in such a place.

All signs of an infection had completely disappeared today. He was ok to have is yoghurt, we sat him out in his wheelchair, he had a number of therapies, and – while I was away – Pat said that he was great answering quite a few of her questions using his tongue. He has been on the speech valve 24 hours a day since last Wednesday without any problem whatsoever. We are not sure, but it seems like he will have the tube going into his throat replaced tomorrow by a much shorter tube, reducing the level of intrusion quite a bit. We’ll see when we meet his speech therapist in the mooring, following by a combined physio/OT session!

By now you know that I got up at 5.30 this morning, it’s 11pm now here in Hamburg, and I’ll have to go to sleep.

Oíche mhaith.