What did I do first thing this morning? – You guessed it. I called my Genossen. It took a while to get through to them, they are busy, even in the early morning. But then the phone rang and on the other end of the line was the person responsible for letting me know that – YES, we got the apartment. Well, it’s 99%. Next week, there will be a “Vorabnahme”. They’ll check that we didn’t destroy the apartment and if the inspector signs off, we’ll be ok to sign the new rental agreement. (Let’s just hope it won’t be the condensation-on-the-window inspector:).

There were two really interesting bits of German news today. Both pretty unbelievable.

The first one was that one of the big German banks will make large corporations pay (!) if they want to deposit their money with them. Just to make sure you get this: the corporation is putting money into the bank, presumably large amount, and rather than gaining interest from that deposit, the corporation will have to pay the bank a fee for the privilege to accept its money. – Would that be a nice little business for the Irish Government? Charge large German corporations for depositing their money with them? Wouldn’t that solve everybody’s problems? The German corporations would save money, and the Irish Government would get huge amounts of cash at 0% interest to pay for hospitals and neuro rehab, for example. Michael Noonan – do you know about this? It could save us millions!

The second one really surprised me – I had heard about this but didn’t think it would still work. It’s a judgement by the German Federal Constitutional Court in favour of a Catholic Hospital that had dismissed a consultant (Chefarzt, no less). What’s surprising or strange about this, you might ask? Surely, doctors get dismissed all the time and there are plenty of reasons for that, as we all know: criminal behaviour, malpractice, and many other reasons. Well, in this case the hospital had dismissed the doctor because… well, because the man got married, though that wasn’t the problem either. The problem was that he had got married the second time! Imagine that. He got married a second time and because of that he lost his job in the hospital because the hospital decided that people getting married a second time should not be allowed to work in a catholic hospital. And the German Federal Constitutional Court decided that the owners of the hospital had a right to expect from their employees to adhere to the its catholic ethos. – I was thinking how lucky that hospital is that they had the spare time and resources to bring this case up to the Federal Constitutional Court to get rid of this doctor because he had got married a second time. Most hospitals I got to know over the past 16 months are struggling to get the basics right. Und überhaupt, wenn das jeder machen würde – wo würden wir denn da hinkommen?

Pádraig had a busy day today. I went to his double physio session around lunch time. They sat him up on the bedside which was brilliant to see. I had asked before whether they could try to transfer him from the bed to the wheelchair without the lift. And today we took the first step in trying. As I was the tallest in the room, they let me have a go too. I think that with a bit of practice, I’ll eventually manage. It’ll be very useful to be able to do that, especially in circumstances when we won’t have access to a lifter, like when we’ll be travelling. (There is a long list of trips, from Connemara, to Georgia, to Alaska.)

Remember? – “The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence—the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes—all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand.”