The latest from the Schön Klinik is that they are picking up on the soccer world championship and the German triumph for their annual staff do, just down here on the grounds behind Haus 2 – which means that we’ll have prime seats from Pádraig’s window:) Staff from the different sections of the hospital will nominate soccer teams and, on 02 August, they will compete against each other for most of the day (it’s a big hospital).  Not sure whether the neuro team will nominate a soccer team, but if they do, I’m sure they’re going to win. There ain’t anybody who could get near them, never mind beat them:)

Pádraig continues to progress in amazing ways. He continues to eat – it was finely minced carrots today, which must have been a bit of disappointment after ice-cream and pudding -, he is sitting out in the wheelchair with his feet in shoes placed firmly on the ground getting ready for the next steps, and having no problem whatsoever with his speech valve. We can see that he is trying to articulate and react with his voice, but this is still a bit too much of a challenge for him after a year of not having a voice – although he is getting better at it. What a day it’ll be when he is ready to tell us what he is thinking about all this stuff going on around him! In the meantime, we are trying to encourage him to keep trying. And keep trying. And one more time – yes!

During the week I was reminded of this thing that few of us in the western world are aware of, as we think that everybody else is just like us. The ‘thing’ is that different people, and not just the Chinese with their years of the different animals and their famous New Year celebrations, use different systems to calculate time, days, months… Muslims, for example, use the lunar calendar. And, apparently, that is out of sync with the solar calendar we are using. So their holy month of Ramadan, which they are celebrating currently, moves every year a few days in relation to ‘our’ calendar. This year, it falls in July. So what? Where’s the problem?

No problem at all, unless – you live in Tromsø. The idea of Ramadan is that you cannot eat or drink from the time the sun rises to the time the sun settles. And yes, you’ve got it: that doesn’t happen in Tromsø in July. There is day light all day and all night. So the 900 muslims living in Tromsø were faced with a bit of a problem which took them quite some time to resolve, in fact three years passed between getting advice from senior clerics and discussions within the community. Eventually, they agreed that they would refer to the daylight hours in Mecca, which has 15 hours of daylight and fasting. – Fair enough, you might say, but one curious consequence of this decision is that muslims in Tromsø now fast for less hours than the muslims living in Oslo – which has 20 daylight hours in summer, encouraging some to move up to Tromsø for Ramadan. (More details about this story in this week’s English edition of Der Spiegel, if you are interested.)

What else is going on today in the world? – Well, it’s Mick Jagger’s (whose?) 71 birthday. And they played one of the greatest songs ever on the radio this morning for him on RTÉ, Wild Horses: Wild horses couldn’t drag me away…