Here is no. 3: Como esperando Abril by Silvio Rodriguez, a song announcing spring, with it brighter days, hope and better times to come. – Let me know which songs touched you in 2018 (or any other time) and why. I’ll collect the titles for Pádraig’s 2018 Christmas CD.

There are moments when I hear echoes of a different life, a different reality, a different time, of what was normality. There are moments when I feel how tired I really am. That’s when I realise what different perspectives, different life circumstances can do to you, making you believe that what you experience is what is reality, objective reality. It’s when I realise that it is anything but. I am frightened when I experience these moments, when I feel that I am living a life in a permanent state of emergency. And for the time being, there ain’t anything I can do about it.

I know I should, like everybody else, have regular sleep, eat healthy and regularly and not too late in the day, make sure to exercise, drink loads of water, have time for myself. I am sure all or some of these things will by on my list of New Year resolutions. I also know that, for whatever strange reasons, I will, if at all, only partially succeed in realising any of these resolutions.

Another great day in the swimming pool with a fantastic helper. It must be one of Pádraig’s favourite days. I have to think, sometimes, of another song I heard for the first time in 1980 in Salamanca. It has a line saying “¡Oh, no eres tú mi cantar no puedo cantar, ni quiero a este Jesús del madero sino al que anduvo en la mar!” – I don’t want to sing to the Jesus on the cross but to the one who walked across the sea.

Please send on more songs. Don’t leave Pádraig stuck having to put up with “my” songs!