Dublin is covered by a deep blanket of snow with temperatures well below zero, bringing the country to a stand-still. Winter has truly arrived.

To be honest – that’s not entirely true. Although the picture above is real and I just took it a few minutes ago when I brought out the bins. It is cold and there was some snow to cover the cars, but that’s it. I’m sure it’ll all be gone by tomorrow morning.

Before I brought out the bins tonight, I watched Ireland’s premier investigative news programme, Primetime, where the case of Catherine O’Leary was highlighted. She lives, according to her father, with a locked-in syndrome at home and has 10 staff, eight of them full-time, working with her. The staff has been paid out of a 2.5m euro settlement over the past four years. Apparently, the money will run out in about seven months. The father appealed to the HSE and the Department of Health to make sufficient funding available to him to keep his daughter at home. The problem is that his daughter has outlived the life-expectancy on which the settlement was based; and the settlement is final.

The programme highlighted the fact that Catherine’s case demonstrates a shortcoming in the way that settlements are made currently in Ireland: they are final and are often based on assumptions – when the assumptions are shown to be wrong, the settlement cannot be adjusted.

The programme, however, only touched briefly on another anomaly in the irish system and that is that the level of care Catherine receives at home could only have ever been  sustained because of the settlement that was made – by the looks of it, 500,000 euro were made available to her every year to care for her over five years, her assumed life-expectancy. Now that she has outlived that life expectancy, maybe because of the great care that very settlement made possible, there is going to be a big problem. No settlement money – no adequate home care.

This is a reality, and I think an incredible injustice, that Pádraig have had to live with since his accident in Cape Cod.

I’m feeling better and i’m back with Pádraig tonight. It is great and feels so good and familiar. I really missed his company. The last week, when I was ‘out’ sick, has taken so much out of ‘the other carer’ that she has spent most of the day resting, which is good and very necessary, but just shows. It is a bit frightening to see what happens when both of us aren’t that well. But we’ll get over it. Of course we will.

Even if tonight the most unlikely thing happened and Dublin really got snowed under:)

We are surrounded by pictures and it takes something extraordinary to make us stop and take notice. This is one of these extraordinary pictures. Two hands reaching dipped into the water, reaching out to this extraordinarily beautiful whale.

A tourist on a boat in Laguna San Ignacio reaches into the water in the hope of petting one of many gray whales that frequent the bay to mate and care for their young. Once feared by fishermen, the unusually friendly animals are now a crucial part of the economy. (This photo was originally published in “Baja California’s Recipe for Saving Fishing Communities,” in September 2017. PHOTOGRAPH BY THOMAS P. PESCHAK, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC)

What makes this picture so exceptional in my view is the contrast between the two ‘creatures’ and the reaching out by each in their own way to the other.

I’m still not back working and living with Pádraig, though I’m getting there. I thought I’d be much better today, but then when I tried, I realised that I wasn’t. I know whatever I’m dealing with is something that can be dealt with, that time does make ‘go away’. That’s one thing time is good for.

We went to a funeral mass today for the husband of a friend who had died last week of motor neurone disease. The family lives just outside of Dublin in what used to be a small village and is now almost a suburb of the city. Even though, the church had not changed and still looked like a small country church; the people at the mass who packed the church beyond capacity also felt much more like a close nit country community than a cosmopolitan city crowd. The mass brought home the immense tragedy of his untimely death as well as the tremendous loss his departure meant to his wife and children, as well as to his wider family, friends and the community where he had lived.

The man had died at my age. He is had a wife and three children. So there were a few parallels and, for a moment, I thought about my own, and then ‘our’, limited presence on this earth.

New lives arrive and existing lives are taken away. All the time. Everybody knows, but few notice and only if and when they are directly affected. Everybody also knows that this whole process mostly just happens.

My presence on Earth, my arrival and my death, are accidental. (Unless, of course, I believe in a divine plan, some kind of ‘book’ that contains my name; a concept, I have problems with.) Therefore, the ‘big’ thing, the thing I can take charge of, the one I am responsible for, are neither my birth nor my death. It’s the time in between. However long that is.

Yes, there are plenty of reasons to mark the beginning and the end of one’s presence on Earth. But it’s only that presence that really counts: life.

Still not back to ‘normal’, still staying away from Pádraig so that I don’t pass on whatever it was that knocked me out. Hope to change that from tomorrow. I’m feeling better and while it’ll take another few days to recover fully, the ‘good’ molecules in my body are taking control back over from the ‘bad’ ones. (I know that’s not the way it works but that’s how it feels:)

I’m wading through legislation, policies, procedures and codes of practice. There’s too much material for any person to read.

And if one person managed that person would find no relation to reality in all these papers. It’s meant well. So next week, we’ll sign it. Seal it. And deliver it. Full steam ahead!

The last week has been incredibly different. I’m missing Pádraig and being with him. I’m experiencing another life, one I haven’t been in touch with. And I’m wondering: are these two different lives? Separate from each other? Or can they co-exist?

This is what Liveline, Ireland’s most popular phone-in show, posted today about carers:

Low wages, impossible travel requirements, no sick pay, no pension, no job security, zero hour contracts, stress, frustration, despair. These are the conditions carers are working under in Ireland today. One carer after another spoke to Joe about what they endure as they try to look after Ireland’s sick and elderly. All of them work for private companies paid by the HSE.

I texted in to let them know how this incredible situation affected those receiving care. Imagine: being cared for by somebody on low wages on a zero hour contract with no job security. By someone who is stressed, frustrated and in despair. They rang me and asked did I want to talk about the lack of regulation, about the inability of care agencies to implement care plans even when the money has been made available to them by the HSE, about our experience.

Listening back to it hurts a bit, to be honest, because I talked too much around the issues I wanted to raise instead of crystallising them and putting a clear and cold spotlight on one or two important issues. But – that’s how you learn. And I will take that as a lesson.

Táithí gan Terrain is the name of a new mini series on TG4, in which “Irish chefs, farmers, nurses and fashionistas are forced out of their comfort zone as they try out their jobs in foreign climes”.

It started tonight and featured Cian (Pádraig’s good friend and celebrity chef) and Pádraig (another Pádraig, one from Galway and also a chef).

Over a week, the two lads travelled around a handful of locations in India, temples, villages, towns, huge cities. They found that, even in an overcrowded home for kids, the kids were happy, and they wondered why people on Grafton Street didn’t have that same lovely smile on their face as the family working their self-sustaining farm in the middle of nowhere.

The programme turned out to be a fraud.

Because it wasn’t about India at all. It was about us.

It was a reflection on our culture and society where we are all so busy that we have very little time to look out for one another, or: just to be happy with what we have  and who we are. It made us think about our world where two of the most popular resolutions for the new year are, every year again, to loose weight and to de-clutter.

Both Cian and fellow chef Pádraig (the one from Galway) repeatedly said they’d never in their lives forget this trip and the opportunity to share some of the happiness of some of the poorest people on the planet.

The focus is on us, the ‘rich’. Not on them, the ‘poor’. It’s us who’ll have to change. Not them

Otherwise we’ll continue to live on Mars. And from time to time take a week out to go and visit the poor – wondering why they are so much happier than us; when we are so much ‘richer’ and they are so much ‘poorer’.

Although I’m feeling much better, I’m still trying not to get to near Pádraig and the rest of the family. Can’t wait to get better. Can’t wait to start ‘living’ with the rest of the family and, especially, Pádraig again. Feels like ages that we spent time together.

In order to see things you need to look at them from the outside. Everybody knows (and would agree) that you only see trees when you’re in the wood, but never the wood itself. Few realise what that means.

Here is what happened to me today.

I haven’t been out driving on the road through the city on my own for some time. Worse, I was so sick for days, I was ‘deprived’ of any stimulation of any of my senses because they just didn’t seem to exist anymore. So today, these are just two examples of a myriad of incredible, amazing things I saw when I got out again for the first time.

A logistics company with a an email address: info@con-log.ie. I mean “CON-LOG”??? Does that not make you think immediately of a new crime-stopper initiative you hadn’t heard about yet??? And never ever of a LOGISTICS company??? I ask you, who under the heavens came up with this name? Almost sounds like somebody tried a bad joke.

And then a little red, pretty worn, but solid as usual, Nissan Micra – wait: SPORT! Ok Ok – Micras are great little cars. And: I get BMW “Sport”, even FIAT “Sport”, but Nissan Micra “Sport”??? I mean, honestly, this sounds exactly like ‘open secret’, ‘living dead’, or ‘military intelligence’ – what linguists call an “oxymoron”! Could you think of anyone, I mean anyone, who would come up with even the idea of calling a Micra a Micra “Sport”? I wanted to overtake the car to see who the poor devil was who had been landed with this oxymoron of a car – but in one way or another, the sports label must have worked on this poor soul’s self perception down on Gardiner Street and made him belief that he was no other but Ralf Schumacher driving a Ferrari down the Nürburgring. When the lights turned green, he revved up and disappeared in a split second on the horizon.

There is so much irony surrounding us, we usually don’t see it anymore.

Soon we will have a chance to demonstrate what the support survivors of sABI, their families and their friends have a right to should look like. We will have to demonstrate this together and create a service and a place like no other. Not a rehab centre, not a rehab hospital, not a sad place where sad people meet who require our pity. But a bright, sparkling, energetic, funky, open space full of life where sABI survivors get all the support they need to live their lives as independently and as much integrated in society as possibly, a space for live, a resource for life, designed for life.

Everything else would turn the term ‘health service’ into an oxymoron. A bit like, you know… 🙂

(PS1: A private message to my millions of followers: still only a few hours up every day, but getting over the worst!)

(PS2: A private message to info@con-log.ie: change your email address. Today.)

{PS3: A private message to Nissan: If I was you, I’d remove that “Sports” badge from the Micras. Seriously.)

For all the millions of followers out there who are wondering how am I doing. I’m getting better. So much so that I managed to get out of bed for a few hours today. While I felt really positive about it, I wasn’t allowed to get near anybody or anything, and instead of the tender loving care I had expected I was greeted by people offering me face masks and hand sanitiser. I guess that at the end of the day, every (wo)man for him/herself:)

While I had my first bite to eat for a while I watched a bit of the evening news. During a commercial break they showed an ad by Laya Healthcare, one of Ireland’s largest health insurers.

Not sure what you think about this ad. I thought: Ok: people, animals, stuff, stumbling, falling, rolling down a steep hill with paint guns exploding all around them proves that “it’s good to live”? Are they for real?? And then, when I did a bit of research, I discovered that the company paid 2.5 million (!) euro for this integrated ad campaign! They even have a variation on the tumbling down theme with a health coach  timing the tumbles of all the apples, bikes, dogs, and people, before they’re all hit by paint balls.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been out sick in bed for a few days and still feel a bit dizzy. Maybe I’m getting too old to get into this kind of swing? I know healthy living is all about moving, but – tumbling down a steep hill while being shouted at by a health coach just before being shot by giant paint balls?

It’s either a big mistake or well, somebody is on to something big here…

One good thing that transpired over the past days: life for everybody, including for Pádraig, went on without me. I’m sure it wasn’t half as much fun. But: it did. Which is, though it might sound a bit odd, something really reassuring to know. Pádraig continued with his exercises and while he couldn’t go swimming today, life continued, and not all in a bad way.

Another good thing is that we’re planning to sign the agreement with the HSE next week for the An Saol pilot project. Another step forward.

Last but not least: thank you all for your kind words and messages! They really helped to keep the spirit up!

Still down in bed all day with a terrible cold. Didn’t know it could be that bad. But it’s giving me a taste of what it feels like, not being able to get up!

This morning I felt to bad that I had to spend all day in bed. It’s just a cold, but it drains not just my nose and throat, but also my energy of which there is absolutely none left. Nada. So here is to a good night’s sleep and a better tomorrow…