I’ve started to get my ‘stuff’ out of bags and boxes – including back ups of my laptop. I’m trying to organise Pádraig’s ‘stuff’ too: documents, letter, videos, pictures – which is when I came across this picture taken last summer on Germany’s North Sea cost.

We were on the outside balcony of a restaurant on stilts in the middle of a vast sandbank in the North Sea enjoying the good weather on a brilliant August afternoon.

Looking at this makes me feel happy.

I’ve thought about whether this isn’t strange. And, to be honest and not naïve, this happiness isn’t a ‘happy-clappy’-kind of happiness. It’s a kind of happiness that is closer to something like a deep appreciation that we are all together, enjoying a perfect day, wearing cool sunglasses (life is all about cool sunglasses): breathing, smelling the sea, listening to the waves, feeling the sun on our skin, hearing the happy voices of the people all around us (even Germans can be happy on a warm, sunny day literally on top of the world).

I thought: we’ll have more days like these. We’ll be in more places like these. And we’ll share our happiness and our appreciation of life with its perfect moments with people who think and genuinely feel that there is no way out for them. Maybe we can change their mind?