No, not the one you’re familiar with (the one related to the light bulbs) but that part of land in the North of Germany that gets flooded with the changing tides. Every day. And there’s one ‘Watt’ called ‘Katinger Watt’ that is special, because it is also a nature reserve. More importantly, it has one of the most beautiful and peaceful cafés. And this is where we went today.

It was one of those afternoons we’ll remember. I think we were happy for a while. And what more could you ask for?

The idea was to swing back into some kind of routine today. We were all too tired, getting up not close to seven but more towards nine o’clock With some exercise for Pádraig in the morning and getting a few things worked out, we had a brunch, rather than the planned breakfast. Following on to this, the day gained its own dynamic. In other words, not much of what I had planned for the day worked out.

Did that matter? – Not at all. Plans change and at times beyond our control.

The perfect day. Breakfast out in the garden, a bit of shopping, and a walk out into the sea towards the Arche Noah.

It’s incredibly hard to do it and it’s truly amazing to be able to do it. Pádraig had been here on a day trip from Hamburg, but now he’s back in the house. He’s eating and drinking and when he’s having an ice-cream, guess what, he can eat the waffle too. Sounds like not much of a big deal, but it is. He is doing things he used to do, more and more of them. He’s going places he used to go, more and more of them. And he is enjoying it. Are we looking back at the way it used to be? How do we react when a little boy comes over and asks what happened to him and the mother asks would we like her to take a picture of the three of us when I’m (hopelessly;) trying to take a selfie? – You could say, none of this is like the way it is supposed to be. But how is life supposed to be? How?

Many things could have gone wrong. But they didn’t:)

Even while we were away, an absolutely brilliant workman put in an anti-slip wood-look-alike floor into the bedroom and the living room downstairs, and we managed to get a lot of the German-based equipment going tonight, having driven through some of those 10km-long traffic jams on the German autobahn, then catching up on time at 100m/hr on the no-speed-limit Freie Fahrt für Freie Bürger roads.

I am conquering old memories that make me cry when I look back at them. Like all the time we spent in Tating, the months that shaped our lives. The dreams and ideas we had then. The ‘problems’ we all had. The care-free summers on the beach, in my sister’s restaurant.

But we’re not looking back, we take what is ours and make it part or our future. There’s no reason, no need, and no way we’ll be stuck in the past. Life happens today. Not yesterday. Each day we’re creating new and more exciting memories we’ll look back on one day and say: wasn’t that incredible?

I can tell you: it is. Incredible. And it’s unbelievable. It’s exciting.

The way life’s supposed to be.

We’re driving up North. After a morning of therapy sessions, lunch and a quick bag-packing sessions, we left Pforzheim to go to Tating. I had booked a hotel to stay overnight (noting that one of us was a wheelchair user). A few hours into the drive, we received a phone call from an angry hotel owner telling me that next time I’d better ring rather than just booking online. What if he had overlooked my note about the wheelchair user??!! They had no rooms left on the ground floor – and they had no lift to go up to the next floor. He felt really inconvenienced with me having booked this room we now couldn’t take and which he needed because there is a big exhibition in town. I answered that getting this phone call on the motorway on our way to his hotel wasn’t really convenient for us either.

Anyhow, after just a couple of phone calls, made from a truck stop on the motorway, we found a place in a pension-hotel, or rather: in the olde house of the old owner of that hotel.

This is just the living room. There’s also a kitchen, WC and bathroom. All for €60 for the three of us. It’s as if our ‘retro’-journey was continuing…

Codo’s “Ich düse, düse, düse, düse im Sauseschritt und bring die Liebe mit von meinem Himmelsritt. Denn die Liebe, Liebe, Liebe, Liebe, die macht so viel Spaß, viel mehr Spaß als irgendwas” is so retro that it is now super cool. You really have to listen to it, to watch it. Crazy stuff. Literally, out of this world!

It’s the story about a world dominated by hatred but conquered by love via spacecraft Codo ‘manned’ by two girls bringing love and defeating hatred. The story is from 1983 and a band called, what else, “Deutsch- Österreichisches Feingefühl” – a name as ‘affengeil’ as the song published at the height of the Neue Deutsche Welle.

When I watched the video and listened to the song I thought that everything is really quite simple. Black and white. Right and wrong. Love and hate.

Let’s make a test.

Take an imaginary sheet, draw an imaginary line through the middle of it and write all the good things on the left and all the bad things on the right. I’m sure you won’t find it difficult to decide whether a ‘thing’ should go onto the ‘good’ or the ‘bad’ side of the sheet.

Of course, it’s not always that easy in ‘real’ life. Knowing what is the right thing and then doing the right thing is often much more difficult and much more complex than one would expect.

Talking about tests: Today, I did a course to become a Certified Hocoma Lokomat user, meaning that, thanks to the generosity and training provided by the Therapy Centre here, I will soon be certified by the company that develops this robotic walking equipment, to use it with patients. I’m thrilled.

Here is Pádraig walking. (The video is not great because the person trying to record it, recorded it by accident moving really fast. I had to slow down the playback speed which interfered with the quality of the recording.)

I have started to read Pádraig short stories in the evening. I experienced this during our journey to Lourdes and felt it was a brilliant way to finish the day. I looked for short stories on the internet and found a few websites that got me going.

On one of those sites they also had proverbs and aphorisms. There was one Chinese proverb that reminded me of my final pedagogy exams in college which were all about how to engage students not by telling them about whatever you wanted to teach them, not by showing them, but by involving them. This Chines proverb was in German, here is my English translation: If you want to find out about something, ask someone with experience, not a scholar.

Just by coincidence, this proverb also reflects what the co-owner of the rehab centre told me today with incredible passion, i.e. that there is very little recent scientific research into how to successfully treat severe acquired brain injury. To be fair to her: she said there is none. She said that this is the case because ‘scientist’ working with very well defined ‘experiments’ can not establish the conditions under which independent, repeatable and measurable ‘experiments’ or observations can be made in relation to that treatment. This is what the scholars have told her, the practitioner.

She knows what needs to be done to support the recovery of sABI survivors. I know what Pádraig needs. Maybe not all of what he needs, but I have a pretty clear picture. I have almost four years of experience of him being treated, of seeing how others like hime respond to certain types of treatment.

For example, today we walked Pádraig across the full length of the therapy room with me supporting him on his back and the main therapist supporting his knees and moving his feet. It was the smoothest thing ever. We could not have done this without Pádraig’s support. We tried but could not have done this late last year. – This is experience. How would you ‘measure’ in a ‘pure science’-type experimental setup?

According to what I heard today it seems as if we needed to find new ways of capturing progress made by survivors in order to proof that therapy is essential to recovery. Would common sense be to ‘common’ and not sufficiently ‘scientific’? Should we establish what is going on with those who are having the experience rather than with those who think they understand because the studied?

Something happened on the recent trip to Lourdes I hadn’t mentioned yet. For the first time in my entire life, someone who wanted to know my age and who I asked to guess said: around 60. Can you believe it? How wrong can you get this??!!

I had to think about this today, as I realised that over the past few weeks, I’ve saved the Irish tax payer, more precisely the HSE, thousands of euro by doing the work of the four PAs who are usually helping Pádraig, never mind doing the work of several therapists. Not out of choice. When I asked the HSE about paying PAs in Germany, they started to look into this possibility and, as far as I am aware, they are still doing it.

Pádraig and I visited a friend’s house this afternoon here in Pforzheim which was great because it took us out of the therapy environment dominating our days. For a few hours we talked about anything but brain injury, rehabilitation, and An Saol. As if life was ‘un-injured’. Pádraig had cold drinks and a huge home made strawberry ice-cream, and didn’t cough even once. He tried so hard that he managed it all perfectly.

I’ve decided to follow Pádraig’s example to defy the laws of physics, chemistry, biology and whatever else, as Pádraig a true dreamboater, and that I will be strong, fit and confident – most of the time:) – as he is.

Even when I’ll be 60 one day (in the distant future) or even older!

I’m listening to Richie Havens’ High Flying Bird on Spotify (check out the really amazing camera work and moving shadow on the recording). One of the heroes of Woodstock on the media that is the anti-thesis to what Woodstock stood for! I’m sitting in a big attic, on my own. Pádraig is asleep downstairs after a busy day. We will have a few days on our own until Thursday.

Over the past few weeks I’ve felt like imploding and exploding. Sometimes simultaneously. Imploding out of helplessness, exploding out of impatience with a world that really doesn’t get it at times.

None of it makes sense: neither should I feel helpless, nor frustrated about what is, as I would say in German: “Sonnenklar”, as clear as mud.

There is hope though!

Early this morning, I received first an email from the mayor of Bad Herrenalp and then from the CEO of the Gartenschau. Both apologised for the trouble we had yesterday and hoped we still had had a great day at the show. They also asked for my account number and said they’d transfer the 13 euro they had charged for the person accompanying Pádraig to my account.

If the Germans can change… ?!

PS: Just came across what must be the coolest (though not the best:) version of my favourite song, All Along the Watchtower, by the Allman Brothers. Pure Soul, as one comment says.

I bet you’d never have thought to travel from Bad Herrenalb to South America using public transport. I bet you wouldn’t have thought it was possible. I bet the vast majority of you haven’t got a clue of where in the world Bad Herrenalb is!

Fact is: Bad Herrenalb is a spa in the Black Forest and it does have a train station from where it’s perfectly safe and possible to travel to Frankfurt airport via Karlsruhe – as I learned from our friends today, when we visited them today, yes, you guessed it correctly: in Bad Herrenalb.

Bad Herrenalb’s claim to fame this year is the Gartenschau it is hosting: there are concerts, talks, loads of flowers, a little stream, and a few stands where you can get something to eat and drink. We had a great time walking around, catching up on each other’s lives. It was a great afternoon out, away from our routine, being with friends, enjoying life, good company and fresh air.

We had a bit of a frank discussion with the event organisers at the end of our visit to the garden show. Turns out that people who have an ID showing that they are disabled and need a person to assist them can bring in that person for free. The three of us had to pay 37 euro entrance fee for the afternoon, which is not exactly cheap for a walk in a park, when one of us should have been able to go in for free accompanying Pádraig, bringing the entrance fee down to 24 euro. Turns out that this reduction only applies to persons with a disability ID card showing the letter ‘B’ for ‘Begetter’ or companion. Now, there are two obvious things to note here: one is that it only works for Germans with a German disability card; the other one is that there is no doubt in anybody’s mind that Pádraig is disabled and does require assistance. But – Germans being Germans, and the organisers of the garden show being who they are, they were unable to apply common sense – but followed orders: no card, no free ticket. No matter what. A piece of paper effectively overwriting reality. Unreal, isn’t it?