It's Happy Reunification day here, also known as: a day off for what was it again?

My dead mother would be in tears today and my very much alive father would probably say something meaningful and prosaic but I have no intention to spoil his day and call. He had his share of historic dramas and memories.  Let him enjoy the sun and the football match on TV. No doubt he will fight his own demons at some stage today anyway.

I don't spend much time thinking about it but when I do the effect is enormous, way beyond my scope of understanding because you see I ran away in disgust not only from my family but from this country and all its mess and I had no intention to ever return (ha and bloody ha).

We forget. Of course we do and for all the best reasons. We forget that on the 9th of November (due to a couple of convoluted reasons we are commemorating this on a 3rd of October) in 1989, close to midnight, a handful of border guards (who were also members of the GDR secret service) no longer wanted to protect their failed state from its own people and opened the gate at the Bornholmer Strasse border point in Berlin. And so WWII was finally over.

Watching it here (start at 4:18 with the shouts of open up and we'll be back and no violence up to 7:18 with the bewildered face of the border guard) I am reduced to my mother's tears.

But otherwise it's glorious autumn and the Irish visitors are out there climbing hills and medieval castle towers, tasting the new wine and generally having a ball. 

While I am supposedly editing something urgent and almost past its deadline but thanks to events across the pond where a gang of renegade morons, so it seems, is spitting venom and fighting life and reason, I cannot access the Medline database to verify the references. Instead, together with people involved in medical research across the globe I get to read this message:

PubMed is open, however it is being maintained with minimal staffing due to the lapse in government funding. Information will be updated to the extent possible, and the agency will attempt to respond to urgent operational inquiries. For updates regarding government operating status see USA.gov.

It feels like a Disney movie in comparison.