Take a walk on the wild side. Sure, why not?

This song is from 1972. Incredible 46 years old. And it sounds as fresh as ever. When it came out it was more than controversial. Except in Germany, Germans don’t listen to – and if they do, they mostly don’t understand – the lyrics. Just remember Zappa’s Harry Brown, number one in the German charts for months. Maybe that’s the reason why it’s easy to take that walk, on the wild side, in Germany?

Earlier in the week Pádraig took a walk, with a little help from his friends.

 

This is stuff he has done before here in Germany. (At a time when one of Ireland’s leading neuro physios wouldn’t even sit him up. When a private company distributing exercise equipment in Ireland was stopped by a physio and a physio manager selling that equipment to us. It would have been too dangerous for Pádraig, they told us.)

But he had never walked with such fluency, with so much ease, and with so little support.

Today, Pádraig did one better than earlier in the week (but today no-one took a video…). He did what he has been doing in the pool for some time now: he lifted up his legs and moved them forward himself. Slowly, a bit awkwardly, with interruptions, with me holding him and the therapist checking his feet and legs, and over just a short distance. But he did it.

I had to think about that “Walk on the wild side”. He was doing things nobody is supposed to do, according to the establishment. It was like shaving your legs, plucking your eyebrows and going: “Doo do doo, doo do doo, doo do doo”.

It’s such great fun and so enjoyable: doing your thing, because that’s what you want to do and that’s what you need to do, and you don’t really care about what you’re supposed to do doo do doo, doo do doc, doo do doo.

What a perfect day!