The final days of my German period turned out to be among the darkest of my 48 years. I was in the midst of the longest spell of unemployment I had ever suffered (3 months), my ten year relationship with the woman I loved had collapsed and, for the first time ever in my life, my body had betrayed me by getting ill. While not exactly the dreaded “dark night of the soul” it was a pretty gloomy evening.

Like any red-blooded, working class Englishman, my response to all this crap was to ignore it until the world became a better place. So, as the brassy Central-European summer heat gave way to cooler Autumn days I stayed in a haze of denial for most of the time, surfacing occasionally to do the odd spot of freelance web development or documentation that my network of friends found for me to enable my survival.

As the last Christmas of the 20th century and the birth of the 21st loomed I began to be aware of loneliness. With no money for travelling I would be unable to visit either of my families in Scotland or Liverpool and all most all of my German friends would be leaving Darmstadt to join their own families. It looked like it was going to be a long, dark winter for yours truly. Then, just as in one of those Hollywood movies that you hate because life just isn’t like that, the great Joker in the sky decided it was time for a change.

I was sitting in my room sending Xmas emails and I clicked on a random music icon for accompaniment. As Chumbawamba’s “I get knocked down But I get up again You're never going to keep me down” blared from the speakers the phone rang and I was invited to spend Christmas with two friends and their kids. One hour later the phone rang again and a group of my best mates had organized a New Year’s party on the banks of the Maine in Frankfurt to see in the new millennium. Thus was my immediate future sorted.

The next morning as I sat nursing my third coffee at the breakfast table, my flat mate and good buddy Stefan walked in and threw a folder and an envelope on the table. The folder contained a three page contract for a 3 month project as an e-commerce developer for ESAT based in Dublin and a room reservation for one week in the same city. The envelope contained a plane ticket dated the 7th January 2000.
It appeared that Stefan and another friend Gunter had decided they weren’t prepared to watch me go down the tubes and that it was time I got my ass in gear and stopped feeling sorry for myself.

So it was I celebrated the end of a decade in Germany, as well as the end of a century and the end of a millennium, and returned to my native islands to begin yet another new life.

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