Even though it is only the 3rd week of January outside all thinks Spring is coming. Lets hope those birds and plants are right. 

Just finished a book called ‘A gentleman in Moscow’. The writer Amor Towles has written only one previous book ‘Rules of civility’ which was great as well. Though this one is even better. Not many books like this have been written since the days of the Brontë sisters or Charles Dickens. It was to use an old fashioned word erudite. It was also funny, moving and quite exciting. I really recommend this book to all readers.

While the weather has been awful I felt I could do some binge watching of all sorts of series I missed. The one thing that keeps annoying me is the way so many actresses ( know they are all apparently male now and called actors??) suddenly after starting with a normal often pretty face appear in their show or movie with those funny looking lips. All swollen and misshapen.Now you have to know that I as a child was always teased by my horrible brothers about my lips being so big. I never wore lipstick until I was in my fifties. So it is beyond me why anyone would afflict themselves with giant lips voluntarily. Especially now we have the #metoo business and these same actresses are all standing in line to say how horrible it is that men in power abuse that power. First they have never paid attention in History classes, because then it would not have been such a shock for them. And secondly as most behaviorists could tell them for the male of all ape species the mouth of the female represents her lady parts so turning your mouth in to a weird swollen version of it is like waving a red flag at a bull. Calling yourself an actor will not make them think you actually a man. 
One series I watched and which has not deteriorated over time is the police drama The Bridge, the original Danish/Swedish version. The Scandinavians are not only good at writing great crime stories, but are now also producing these great series, so much different from the usual fare. What is funny is that though I don’t speak a word in any Scandinavian language I still need to hear what they are saying. Proof that we not only listen to the content of speech but get even more information from the sound of the speech.

I will now start “The Immortalists’ which seemed rather intriguing. About four siblings who get told when a child, what day they are going to die and what effect that has on their lives.
Even though we all know that one day we will die, most of us still live as if that only happens to other people. When people hear from their doctor that they only have a short time to live their first reaction is disbelief. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and only much later acceptance are the 5 stages of accepting that one will lose their life. One of my stories The wreck follows these stages. Personally I think that people who believe that there is some kind of afterlife seem to be more afraid of the end than the ones who believe it is just the end no more and no less.