Every day we the news they are full of stories about how cold it is or going to be the next few days. Hold on to your seats: it will be below 0! Maybe someone should explain to these people that it is winter and this is normal and not worthy of a 10 minutes slot of the News while the world is going to hell in a handcart.

Furthermore I am following the court case against a Belgium GP , lets call him John,who had orchestrated his son-in-law’s ,we will call him Peter,murder. Here it is called the Castle murder, as the victim a 34 year old property developer lived in a lovely castle in West Flanders. The whole story reads like a real crime novel.You just can’t make it up.
In short Peter was married to , Mary,the daughter of a local GP, who himself was not short of a penny. They have 4 small children. They seem to live the ideal life living in a castle surrounded by beautiful grounds. 
One day Mary comes home to find a blood trail in the entrance hall of the castle and her husband has disappeared. The police is called and a search is started. They only had one shell casing as evidence.
Soon Dr.John and his son were taken into custody as the rumor mill already had put a story into the world that they had it in for the victim as he wanted to emigrate to Australia and take his wife and children with him away from all her family and friends. But the police had to let them go.When they finally found the body in a pit on the property of a good friend of John, Mr.P. and on top of that found that the pit had been dug 14 days in advance by a cousin of Mr.P. all of the men involved were taken into custody again. This time Mr.P. pointed the finger to the man who had actually done the killing. He was a known criminal in the final stages of pancreatic cancer and died within a few weeks he was found out. After rigorous questioning John first only admitted that he wanted his friend Mr.P. only to hire someone to teach his son-in-law a lesson. But soon after that Mr.P. cracked and told the police that John had pestered him for weeks to have Peter killed.
John changed his story again and tried to excuse his deed by accusing Peter of incest with his kids and that he had to ‘save’ them. 
The court case is still going and prosecution is not being fooled and has asked for the maximum of 30 years prison. And as icing on the cake, Mary is now pregnant from the best friend of her murdered husband…… I wonder when the book comes out.

To write about some more depressing stuff, today we had to attend a funeral of my best friend’s father. He was 90 and had not been ill one day of his life. As a daughter whose parents both died at 55, I think he got a fair innings. Before that we lost a very lovely family friend (94) and straight after that my husband’s uncle who also made it to 94. Now in two weeks we will attend the funeral of an aunt, the aforementioned uncle’s wife, who lived to the ripe old age of 96. I said depressing, but as they all had rather full lives and did not suffer too much in the end it is actually an uplifting story. Being at all those funerals though made me think of how I want my own send off to be. The problem is that I can think of a lot of things I don’t want , but cannot decide how I do like it to be. A Viking send-off in a burning boat would have my preference, but in this day and age I would have to be brought to India where it is still done at the river Ganges. Here in Europe all the health and safety rules probably would prohibit it. My husband finds it morbid of me to want to plan it already and when you think of it you should not give a damn about what they do with your dead body as you will not be there anyway. People have been carrying out burial ceremonies for hundred thousands of years in all matter of ways, but what they have in common is that people get together and mourn and celebrate the diseased and dispose of the body. As contemplating the finality of death is too hard for a lot of people, they have to believe there will be another life one way or the other after death. Be it in some ideal place or through rebirth in another body. But for the first option I think that place will be very overpopulated by now and for the second option our population is getting larger and larger so where do all those extra souls come from. Animals?Plants? Though I must say some people do seem to have been a worm in former life. I will not mention names.

I will leave you all with some uplifting news: The Winter Olympics will finally finish tomorrow, so we can have some real news again. Think this last was a real Victor Meldrew moment. God I love that man. My husband and I well aware that we have entered the grumpy old people phase always say:’I can’t believe it!!”, before we point out some things to each other that was done so much better when we were young. Here some examples of the master.

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