We separate for you! (So you don’t have to do it yourself.)

I am on my last trip away from Hamburg and Pádraig before Christmas. There will be a family visit tonight (probably over by the time I manage to send this), a very very very early drive across Ireland to the West, over to Limerick at lunch time, overnight stay there, back to Dublin in the evening, and back to Hamburg on Friday. (Just took a deep breadth when I finished writing this list. It’s longer than I had thought.)

We went to see Pádraig this morning before we left for the airport. He had been with a couple of therapists and they could not get over how alert he had been: movements and reactions all as per their requests. It was one of his really good days.

Tomorrow will be one of the very rare days when neither Pat nor I will be with Pádraig. We’ll be separated, in a way. But one of his sisters will be with him, and Pat will be back a day ahead of me.

It’s just after midnight now, time to go to bed. But before I go, I wanted to just mention that in between a hectic, long day, tonight I met with one of Pádraig’s great friends from whom I collected some of the CDs. When I write from Hamburg, I think about and feel the friendship and energy, and I know Pádraig does. However, being in the company of his friends is a completely different kind of thing. And I can probably not even just imagine, how that would be for Pádraig.

And two very last notes on what has been on the RTE +1 channel – we missed most of the report from that ‘home’ for people with disabilities, but watched the discussion. What the RTE investigative unit discovered was called by the reporters assault. – What would you call ‘treatment’ that leads to dislocated shoulders, haematoma, dropped feet, and spasms? I’ll stop here and go to sleep. It’ll be another day tomorrow.