The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

When I travelled in Google-Land last week, I ‚met‘ Emma (13) who had been treated at Alder Hey for cerebral palsy. Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust is one of Europe’s biggest and busiest children’s hospitals, where they treat everything from common illnesses to highly complex and specialist conditions.

In these pictures from April 2022, she is holding one of the very first copies of Hospi-Tales, a book put together by Graphic Medicine team at Comics Youth who had spent a year visiting the wards with the aim of raising the confidence and voices of young people with lived experiences of acute, chronic or terminal physical and mental ill health and help them to tell their stories through the medium of comics.

The first thought that crossed my mind was: It took those guys 10 more years than it had taken me to come up with such a brilliant title! I must get it and check it out.

Pádraig’s week was busy as always and slightly more exciting as the average week.

He had some visitors from UCD and Thomas Jefferson University who checked the music tech out with him again. He hadn’t had a session with the guys for some time. It was brilliant to see how Pádraig engaged using the bespoke access tool with the music, playing bells, drums, and the pipes – all via a synthesiser. He also took the opportunity to have another go at the Xbox in An Saol’s Gaming Room.

On Saturday morning, we all went to the Lighthouse Cinema to watch The Blue Road about Edna O’Brien’s life and times. The movie was produced by one of his friends, with Barbara Broccoli of James Bond fame being one of the executive producers.

It is a brilliant movie with fantastic original footage and many many incredibly interesting facts, opinions and views about Ireland’s most famous female writer. I learnt a lot of what would have been my formative years, had I been born in Ireland. And they weren’t pretty.

In the evening, Padraig went with one of his best friends to see Dara Ó Briain in Vicar Street. It was three years ago that the two of them went to a concert together in The Point, or the 3Arena as it is now known, to see Girls Aloud. That was the very first time that Pádraig had gone out with someone, totally on his own.

This was a milestone.

We were unsure whether it would all work out and were thinking ‘what if…’, not really being sure what that ‘if’ was. In the end there was none and both had a cracker of a night with a band that was pure fun. The night was the first of many in which Pádraig went out without us, without a carer – but with a friend.

We hadn’t bought tickets for last night’s gig but helped the two of them to get the wheelchair into the venue. When we were leaving, they guys at the door asked us if we would like to stay on for the show – “totally up to you”?

‘Sure, why not’, we said – and got two tickets up on the balcony, in the middle of the front row, about the same seats Michael D. had for the Irish Folk Awards earlier in the week. Upfront, in the distance, we could make out the two watching and listening Dara.

It was brilliant to be amongst people, seeing them, hearing them, feeling them, smelling them, shuffling with them up and down the narrow stairs and along the equally narrow corridors. Dipping our toes in something normal, something you’d do on a Saturday night.

There was no shortage of kind, generous, and caring people around. Pádraig would not have gone out without this brilliant Christmas present from his friend. We would have wandered the streets, waiting to pick the two up at the end of the concert, had it not been for the kindness of the lads in Vicar Street.

It was refreshing to experience an evening that was so different, because of kind people, to what seems to be going on in the rest of the world.

I can’t believe that I am quoting Machiavelli again. But these are changing times. So here is another quote by the famous man, just for a thought:

The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him. (Machiavelli)