Saturday 16 March 2024

Read in 2024 - 5: Mrs England

Mrs. England

by Stacey Halls


What attracted me instantly when I spotted this paperback at The Little Ripon Bookshop last summer was of course the beautiful cover design. Looking at the blurb on the back, I thought it was going to be a good read.

And now that I have finished it, I can say it was not just a good, but a great read!

From start to finish, I found it to be the kind of story that takes you right in. You know, when you are so "in" a book that you think about the characters in the story while you're not reading, and can't wait for the evening to arrive when you can finally retreat to your bed, prop yourself up with pillows in your back, turn on the lamp on your bedside table and open the book? It was exactly like that for me with this one.

Set in 1904, the story follows a young nurse who has left her position with a wealthy family in London and moves to Yorkshire where she looks after the children of mill owners Charles and Lilian England.

It's not just the change of scenery, local dialect and use of words (such as "dinner" for the midday meal the nurse always knew as "lunch", and "tea" not necessarily meaning a hot drink but the meal called "dinner" in other regions) the newcomer has to adjust to - it's the entire household.

At first, it just seems a bit odd how little involved with her children Mrs. England is; everything Nurse May needs to ask, all decisions her employers make regarding the children, their education, diet and schedule, are to be discussed with Mr. England instead.

Sounding like the perfect family when they were first described to her, Ruby soon finds out that things are not what they seem - but what ARE they, then?

Strange incidents occur (nothing paranormal or supernatural), and slowly but surely the situation escalates to a point of no return.

I am not going to tell you any more - just that I found everything about this book to like and nothing not to like. Language, style, excellent research that makes you feel you know what day-to-day life in a wealthy household (and also in a less well-off one) was 120 years ago. Characters you can relate to, and others you can't work out any better than the young nurse can.

There are points in the story where you may think you know where it is leading, but for me, where it actually did lead to was not what I was expecting.

Read it, if you get a chance! The author's website is here; Mrs England is her third book.

Friday 15 March 2024

First Full Week of March

And (as usual) a full week it was - not just because it was "fully" in March, calendar-wise.


On Monday (4 March), I was able to schedule my work tasks so that I could go for a back, neck and shoulders massage mid-afternoon. The evening saw me at a meeting with my volunteer group.

Tuesday and Wednesday (5 and 6 March) are quickly told: I spent both days at the office in Weilimdorf, and both days were chilly, grey and wet, so that no walk was on the cards other than the few minutes it takes me to get to and from the train stations. 

Wednesday was the 50th birthday of our Head of Department, and she had food and drinks (no alcohol, of course) brought up to our meeting room. After the work part of the meeting was over, we remained together for another hour to celebrate. It is good to have a boss and colleagues I really like and where I feel truly appreciated and part of the "gang".

The 5th strike of train drivers within the past few months on Thursday (7 March) meant I was working from home, and any walk I would want to go for after work would have to be without relying on a train to get back home. 

During lunch break, I quickly popped over to my Mum's for an errand. After work, I walked on the fields for about 1 3/4 hours, which did me good, in spite of it being a cold day with near frost during the night and early morning.



Hedgerows were bursting with buds that day - now, a week and several sunny and mild days later, more and more flowers and the first tender green leaves are showing by the hour.

My mother-in-law in Ripon turned 90 on Friday (8 March). As arranged with my sister-in-law, I called her in the early afternoon. We had a nice little chat and she sounded upbeat and like always - she may sometimes repeat things she has told me before, but all things considered, at 90 she does not sound any different than when she was 70 or 80. (Besides, I do that, too - telling someone the same story again because I forget I have told them already.)

Weather-wise, it was a good late afternoon / early evening for my standard Benningen walk. Entering the little nature reserve just before the first houses of the small town was like walking into fluffy clouds, with trees and bushes covered in white blossoms.


The big ferris wheel is back!!




I travelled to Offenburg on Saturday (9 March) on what was a beautiful sunny day, the warmest of the entire week. My trains were on time, and O.K. and I set off for a walk around the village almost as soon as I got there. Coffee & cake were next, followed by a brief rest and then a visit with O.K.'s Mum.

View from O.K.'s living room into the neighbours' garden. The tree was not yet in full bloom that day, but I am sure it is now.

Sunday (10 March) started sunny again; it rained in the afternoon and for most of the evening, but we didn't have time for a walk anyway. The village brass band were playing in church in the morning, and although O.K. did not play this time (his cough was still quite bad), we still went to church. 

The band members and their families, friends and supporters (such as myself) gathered in the Rectory Hall next to the church afterwards. Lunch was served, and at 2:00 pm the official part began: It was the band's annual General Meeting, plus a retrospective of the last 100 years - 2024 is the band's 100th anniversary.

We were home at about 5:00 pm and spent a quiet evening in, like we do most Sundays when we have an early start on Monday.

Saturday 9 March 2024

Something About AI

Several of my fellow bloggers have been experimenting with AI, such as Neil having AI write poems or create book covers, or Monica illustrating her posts with AI-generated images.

It's all good fun and often shows us what AI can do - and where it struggles.

Some commenters have wondered why, for instance, AI often spells words wrongly in images, or has difficulties picturing hands correctly; others have said that they find AI frightening. Let me try and explain a few things about AI as I understand it; maybe I'll be able to dispel a few myths and alleviate fears. 

Please keep in mind that I am by no means an expert on the matter. I have merely been reading up on it and attending a few webinars on various aspects of AI in my line of work (privacy/data protection, mostly in the insurance industry).


What is AI?

There are various definitions of the term Artificial Intelligence, but the one most people will agree on can be found on wikipedia: „Artificial intelligence, as opposed to the intelligence of living beings, primarily of humans." That is of course a very broad definition and can mean a lot of things in different context, but let it suffice for now.
What is AI really?

For one thing, the term itself - the "I" of it - is misleading. Software or a machine can never be intelligent the way a human being or some animals can be. But a well programmed software and a well constructed machine can "learn", true enough.


Things to keep in mind:

When you are confronted with AI - be it in your line of work, because you are subject to it when dealing with a company, or while you're having fun with an image creator - keeping a few things in mind is useful.

Since this post is becoming much longer than I anticipated, I have put my key statements together here; if you don't have time or can't be bothered to read the rest, that's fine.

1) AI can only be as good as its programming.

2) AI is often biased - again, because of its programming.

3) AI can't autonomously decide to do or learn something it was not programmed for.

4) Good prompting brings good results.

5) AI can not discern between truth and fake, good and bad.

6) It's not AI we need to worry about - it's who uses it, and how.


1) How good AI is depends on two key factors: The database (the "model") it draws on, and the algorithms originally programmed into it (on which base it usually - but not always - can develop new algorithms, hence the "learning" effect). The adage "garbage in, garbage out" is not only true for readers of certain newspapers and viewers of certain TV channels, but also for AI.

Developers of AI have a scope in mind: What is their particular AI supposed to do? Is it generative (generating text, sound - such as speech - or images that did not previously exist) or static (making decisions based on certain criteria, such as "a person over 50 is offered tariff X for life insurance, a person under 50 is offered tariff Y")?

The AI in the first example "learns" with every bit of text and every image it creates. It re-feeds its own database every time it is asked to write something or create a picture. For instance, the poem Neil had AI create recently is now part of that AI's database, which means when the next person asks for a poem with the same prompt (more about prompts later), the AI can draw on its own archive. That doesn't necessarily mean it will produce the same lines as it did for Neil, but there will most likely be similarities.

The AI in the second example doesn't "learn" - it simply repeats what it was programmed to do, and every time its decision will be the same when the criteria are the same. The person over 50 will never be offered tariff Y, and someone under 50 never tariff X.


Maybe at some stage during your school years you learned about algorithms and probabilites. Even if you didn't, the basics are not that compliacted, and you can find good explanations on wikipedia. Let's have a look at them with an example most of us can relate to:

You look for a book in an online shop with recipes for Yorkshire pudding. You find one and order it; once it's been delivered to you, you surprise your loved ones with a great meal, and they love you more than ever.

Next time you visit that shop (or even while you're still on the site, completing your order), you see recommendations. These are based on algorithms. A reasonably well programmed shop will show you more cook books, maybe with recipes for other British culinary classics, or of typical Yorkshire dishes. A less well programmed shop will show you books about Yorkshire terriers; that's because the algorithm does not take into account that the dish and the dog are not directly related; it just sees that they contain the same word. To work well, the algorithm needs to have access to the data base of the shop's products - all of them.

For the probability bit about such recommendations, the algorithm needs access to the shop's sales history. If a certain number of customers have bought not only the same book you have just ordered, but also a biography of Marilyn Monroe, that biography will now be recommended to you - even if the two books have nothing in common. But how probable is it that a significant number of customers have bought both books together? Recommendations based on high probability will be more likely to work for you. Now, if many who buys the cook book get the MM biography recommended AND the two are offered at a special bundle price, more customers will buy the bundle - and the probability of purchase rises, leading to more recommendations, leading to more purchases, further increasing the probability.

See what I mean?


Developers of AI would love to be able to feed "the real world" into their AI. But with all the data in the world, we can not re-create the real world in a database - not really. It is always only an incomplete model of reality, based on available data. Think of a map - it represents a certain town or area, but it does not recreate it - it's only a two-dimensional model of it, and a static one at that, not able to reproduce changes, not giving you an idea about the sounds and smells of the place.

To develop a model for generative AI, a HUGE database is needed. For static AI, the requirements are less demanding.

If your AI is supposed to be able to generate a picture of a dog in the snow, it must have many images of dogs and of snow first - it can't "know" what dogs are and what snow looks like unless it is "taught" about them. Give your AI pictures of 100 different kinds of dog, and it will be able to generate a vast variety of dog images - much more than the 100 you fed it with. Give AI only 10 pictures, it will still produce many different dog portraits for you, but not as sophisticated as the better fed AI.


2) Let's not forget about the bias. AI doesn't think and has no emotions; it being biased is not its fault, but that of the developers responsible for selecting its underlying database. 

Here is an example I was told about last week at a webinar: In order to "learn" to recognise horses, an AI's database was fed with a large number of photos of horses in all shapes, sizes and colours; some were standing, others jumping, running or resting on the ground etc. When testing their AI, the developers found that it recognised horses alright, but it also classified as horses many other animals, people and objects that had nothing horse-like about them. It took the developers a while to find out why - it was the copyright sign included in each photograph. The AI had simply matched the part of each picture it recognised easiest, and that was the copyright sign.

Can static AI also be biased? Yes, of course. Let's say a company wants to facilitate predictions about their customers' paying habits, and base their pricing on how likely it is that someone will need several reminders or not pay at all. The AI they use is fed with payment data of hundreds of thousands of anonymous consumers. If payment information is related to post codes, a pattern emerges, showing that consumers from a certain area are notoriously unreliable payers. Based on this, the company offer their products and services to anyone from that area at a higher price, actively discouraging them from buying - and if you happen to live in that area but are a perfectly good customer, you'll suffer from that bias.


3) If you have seen the AI-created book covers on Yorkshire Pudding's blog or some of Dawn Treader's AI-generated pictures, you have noticed that the spelling is often not right. Why is that? You've guessed it - again, it's down to programming.

Generative AI is programmed to generate text, not to calculate numbers. A text-based AI such as ChatGPT (Generated Pre-Trained Transformer) is exactly what it says: A chatbot, designed to "chat" to whoever uses it. At its base is an amount of text so huge I can't get my head round it - books of all kinds (novels as well as non-fiction), internet articles (probably even content from our blogs), scientific publications - you name it, ChatGPT has it. BUT... and here come two "buts":

Chatbots (in general) are meant to communicate using text (yes, I know - GPT-4 has now learned to use visual content, too). They are NOT meant to calculate. If you ask a chatbot "what is 2 + 2?" it will probably answer correctly, but not necessarily so. If, for instance, in its database it finds "2 + 2 = 5", it may give you this result - not because it "believes" it to be true, but because it can not add - it merely repeats what it has found, and its algorithm has determined this as the most probable answer.

Therefore, an image-creating AI was trained to create images, not spell. That it does not even get the spelling right when a correctly spelled word was used to prompt it just goes to show its limits.


4) Generative AI needs prompting; it doesn't act autonomously, waking up in the morning and thinking "Oh, I might write a poem about spring today." A prompt is what you type in to trigger the AI's work.

Some of you have become pretty good at this, and you have probably noticed how you get better results when you are more specific in what you type in. Say, I want AI to create a picture of myself, cartoon-style, wearing a yellow dress. Just typing in "picture of a woman in a dress" will show me just that, but probably looking nothing like me. "Picture of a woman in a yellow dress" will get closer to what I want. "Picture cartoon-style of a woman with short white hair, wearing glasses and a yellow dress" would probably give a more satisfying result.

The best of four offerings from Bing Image Creator after the same prompt. I never said "polka dots" or "bow" or "wrap-over", but that's the dress I got. Had I said "blue eyes" (I didn't mention the eye colour in my prompt), it would have been more like me.

Adding "blue eyes" to the prompt and using "librarian" instead of "woman", this is what I get - the red nose and pearl studs are the most similar features to the real me :-)
Can you guess what term I put in for "librarian" in my next prompt to get this result?

The same goes for text-generating AI: Be concise but specific in your prompting. Avoid superflual words, such as "maybe" or "perhaps" - even adjectives such as "beautiful" are not always a good idea. But the more you experiment with it, the more you'll understand how it works, and get closer to the desired results.


5) We all know that the internet and some of our traditional media are full of fake news. Not everything presented as a fact is necessarily true, and many news reports are biased in some way. But humans know what they're doing when they bend the truth or edit a report to fit their own agenda - AI does NOT.

Ask a text-generating AI to summarise Obama's life for you, and you may - or may not - find that it gives you a mix of fake and true information about the ex-president, such as his nationality and religion.

Therefore, I urge anyone who uses AI to generate text that is meant to contain facts to always cross-check the facts before publishing that text anywhere. As described before, generative AI re-feeds itself on its own results. This means that if your newly generated text contains a false information, that information will be stored in the AI's database and taken as "truth" by the AI - it may use it next time someone prompts it with a similar request. That way, false information is (often unwittingly) repeated across the internet until many people believe it to be true.


6) The above mentioned example of wrong information gives you an idea of what there is to worry about - not AI in itself; it can indeed be highly useful, apart from it providing some of us with hours of fun. 

But people use AI to achieve something, and their aims are not always honourable. If biased AI is used - deliberately or unwittingly - to make decisions about who gets what offer, who is observed by the police, who is subject to which precautionary measure, things can get really ugly. If AI is used to spread fake news, things will (and do) get ugly.


This is the post in the history of my blog I have spent the most time on writing. I could go on about this subject for a lot longer, but I know from my own experience that overly long posts are not welcome. Still, I hope some of you feel a bit better equipped now when confronted with AI - and confronted with it we all are, whether we want or know it or not.

Monday 4 March 2024

Last of February, First of March

Last week saw the transition from winter (or what passes for it these days in my area) to spring, at least according to the meteorological calendar. I made a surprising discovery and went on a good long walk, but unfortunately spent the weekend without O.K.


In the course of Monday (26 Feb.), the weather changed from rain to sun, and it was rather mild at 10-11C/50F. Maybe you remember how my sister and I used to go for after-work walks nearly every day during the pandemic, but in all of 2022, we had little chance for that with my sister caring for R (who died in November of that year) and both of us going to see our Dad in hospital nearly every day for weeks. 

Much as I don't mind at all (and sometimes prefer) walking on my own, I missed our regular walks together and was happy to meet my sister after work that day. All in all, including the 15 minutes it takes me to get from my place to hers, I was out and about for 2 1/4 hours. 

We spotted one cat who did not want to have anything to do with us and later, a couple (probably siblings) of young-ish cats who were VERY interested but cautious at the same time. Had we spent more time with them, I am sure we'd have befriended them, but we wanted to get on.

Tuesday (27 Feb.) was a little cooler, completely grey and very windy, which made it feel quite chilly at times. My old school friend and I had arranged to meet at the entrance to the palace grounds, but our aim was not a stroll in the park. Instead, we walked up to the complex of offices of a building society and insurance company that has been around in our area for more than a century, with one of its two main firms even going back as far as 1828.

That complex of offices was started in the 1950s with more blocks added to it until well into the 1980s. A few years ago, the old buildings were deemed not worth renovating, and the company built what they call their "campus", a brand new site just a few paces down the road, abandoning the old buildings.

Now that nearly everyone who works there has moved to the new blocks, the old ones stand empty - but as we all know, space is precious, especially in a densely built-up and highly industrialised area such as Ludwigsburg. Plans were called for to give the old place a new lease of life, and those plans were introduced to the public with the opportunity to hand in suggestions and objections. My friend and I wanted to see the plans and models for ourselves, and spent an interesting couple of hours at the exhibition showing the drafts, with experts present to ask questions and give our feedback to.

I worked at the office on Wednesday (28 Feb.) and went to see my Mum after work. She made us a delicious snack of savoury bakes and a fresh salad.

Thursday (29 Feb.) was my 2nd day at the office that week. It was sunny throughout, and knowing I was not going to have a chance for an after-work walk, I extended my lunchbreak by about half an hour and crossed the footbridge from the office building to the fields. A few minutes later and the woods begin, and I had enough time to explore a part where I'd never been before.

Imagine my surprise and delight to come across a small cluster of old buildings, one of them a beautiful wooden pavilion with a golden pheasant on top!

A board next to it informs the interested reader of it being the former pheasantry, originally built in 1818. Back then, this part of Germany had only recently become a kingdom (it was a duchy before), and the new king who was a passionate hunter (weren't they all in those days) now wanted to hunt in style, worthy of a king.

Pheasants were popular game for hunting, but there were nowhere near enough of them in the wild to satisfy the king and his court's want for shooting. Therefore, a farm in the woods was built. Pheasant eggs were collected from the fields and placed with domestic turkey hens for brooding. The hatchlings were well fed and cared for until old enough to satisfy the hunters' wish for big birds, and then systematically released into that part of the woods only to be killed equally systematically.

This kind of "sport" was neither new nor unusual; for centuries, the high and mighty of this world have applied similar methods to satisfay their blood thirst.

Anyway - the buildings are in a beautiful "rustic" style of the time, some of them being used as offices for the Forestry Administration of Stuttgart. The largest of the buildings stands empty and has very much a "lost place" feel.

Lost Place par excellence

The pavilion is the prettiest part of the ensemble. Back in the hunting days, the ladies (who generally did not hunt) whiled away the hours in there until the men came back; then, a sumptous meal (probably including roast pheasant) was served.

Now the wooden structure could really do with some sanding down and a lick of paint, but the golden pheasant at its top still gleams in the sunshine.


In spite of the peeling paint, one can imagine the former glory of the pavilion, decorated with acorns and oak leaves around the rim of the roof.



Walking back towards my office in the long white building.

On Friday (1st of March), O.K. (who had been nursing a cold all week) felt bad enough for us to cancel my plans to spend the weekend at his place.

All morning of that day I attended an online seminar about AI - stuff I need to know for work, but also find interesting apart from work. Some of the explanations given about what AI can do (and what not), and how it works, were really good. I plan to write a post about it soon, having in mind fellow bloggers Monica's and Neil's adventures with image creators.

Being home alone on Saturday (2nd of March) meant I could spontaneously meet my sister for breakfast at our favourite café in town. A stroll across the market followed, and since it was the 1st Saturday of the month, a sale of used books in aid of the church was going on behind the church.

Although I didn't "need" anything, of course I had a look... and went home with 8 paperbacks by two authors I like (Anne Perry and Martha Grimes). They were 1 Euro each, and once I have read them, I will return them to be sold again.

My spoils!
On market days, there is always (I think) a 15 minute organ concert at the church, free for all, donations welcome. As it happened, it was just gone 11:00 when we finished buying books, and the concert had only just begun. (By the way, it was the same church and same organ you can see in this post.)

It was nice to see the church well filled, and we quietly listened to the organ being expertly played for the next 10 minutes or so - a good way to counter-balance the hustle and bustle of the busy market. I must remember to go there again with O.K. some time.

I went home after that, had a sandwich and a bit of a rest before setting off again at 1:30 pm. A local train took me to Marbach, where I started on what you may remember as my Mum and my favourite walk together when my parents still had their allotment.

The way to the allotment, then on to the woods and eventually back to Marbach in a large loop meant walking for a solid 4 hours. This time of year is just wonderful in the sunlit woods, birdsong all around, small flowers everywhere. I spotted two deer in a field, saw several buzzards circling and at one time a large heron flew overhead.

Oh Steinheim in the sun... (sung to the tune of "Island in the Sun")












It wasn't as dark as it looks here on my way back to Marbach, but I arrived at the train station there shortly before sunset.
About 3 hours into the walk I rested on a bench, eating the sandwich I had brought and drinking half of my water bottle.

It had been chilly in the morning at 3C/37F, but the sunny day rose to an impressive 15C/59F in the afternoon - not totally unheard of for my area at the beginning of March, but unusual.

On Sunday (3rd of March), I spent a quiet morning at home and then went to my Mum's for the afternoon. The friend whose mother's funeral my sister and I had attended last Friday was coming for coffee & cake, with his partner. The four of us had a chatty afternoon and early evening together, with my Mum serving a delicious chili sin carne.


Over the weekend, O.K. and I talked every day, sometimes only briefly because he really wasn't well and especially on the Saturday could hardly speak. Respiratory viruses are spreading left, right and centre, and it was much better for him to be on his own this time. Hopefully, next weekend I can travel - train strikes are starting on Thursday, and I may have to find alternative transport.

Wednesday 28 February 2024

Read in 2024 - 4: A Pen Dipped in Poison

A Pen Dipped in Poison

by J.M. Hall


In 2022, I found "A Spoonful of Murder" among donated books for sale in Ripley church, left some money in the box and took it home with me. It turned out to be a really good read (click here for my review), and you can imagine my delight when I found its successor at The Little Ripon Bookshop last summer.

Retired school teachers and friends Thelma, Liz and Pat are still meeting at Thirsk Garden Center for coffee on Thursday mornings. Some things have changed in their home lives, and they are not entirely open with each other, trying to pull through problems by themselves without bothering their friends.

Then they learn of nasty anonymous letters starting to turn up at their old school, and before they know it, all three of them are more than knee deep in a puzzling mix of nasty letters, dodgy (or not?) school accounts, a mysteriously over-heating biomass boiler, school supplies disappearing from the stock room and other funny business.

One of the letters effectively ends someone's marriage, another one leads to a near-suicide, and others claiming that nobody wants the efficient Head there seems harmless in comparison.

What did said Head of the school spot at the summer fête that made her look so shocked for a moment? And who would bother typing letters and hand-delivering them at the risk of being discovered when you could do it all much easier and more effectively on Social Media?

In spite of their homelife situations demanding attention, the three friends combine their efforts, and of course one of them works out the mystery. Not all is well that ends well, but some wrongs are righted, and the old closeness between the three and their husbands is re-established.

Just like the first book, I very much enjoyed this one, last but not least because I know so many of the places mentioned. Even my and my sister's favourite place for eating out in Ripon, Oliver's Pantry, makes an appearance!

I am certainly going to have a browse at The Little Ripon Bookshop this summer - sure that I will find #3 waiting for me.

Monday 26 February 2024

Exhausting Week

Most of my weeks are busy, some more than others; often, the "busy-ness" is of my own choice, what with after-work activities, socialising and so on - but that does not mean I get less exhausted.

Last week, my activities were as mixed as the weather. By Friday evening, I was rather exhausted and welcoming two days of not having to get up early.

Taking my usual trains back from Offenburg on Monday (19 Feb.) morning meant the usual early start for O.K. and me; on such mornings, the alarm goes off at 5:15. 

My breakfast aboard the train.
Tentative signs of spring in my flat; I found these twigs broken off on the ground near a recently cut hedge during our Sunday walk.
All went well and I was home in time to start work at 9:30. After a quiet morning, the entire afternoon was one long online meeting with my professional association. It wasn't boring or unnecessary, just LONG with only a 15 minute break half way through to give everyone the chance to get a coffee. Of course, no walk was possible that day - it was dark by the time we finished, and I was too tired to contemplate anything else but something to eat and watching TV.

Tuesday (20 Feb.) was windy and chilly in the morning (4C/39F), but milder in the afternoon at 10C/50F. I spent my lunch break getting a hair cut (good job my hairdresser is literally just round the corner from my house) and finished work shortly after 4:00 pm. Now that sunset is considerably later than a month or two ago, I knew I had enough daylight left for my standard walk to Benningen, which I really enjoyed.


Plum tree starting to bloom - in February!!


Met this cat in the middle of nowhwere (actually, not far from a farm)

No matter what I tried, he didn't want to face the camera. Cats!
The weather was pretty much the same on Wednesday (21 Feb.), when I was working at the office. An hour before I was due to leave, my Mum texted me and my sister that our Aunt W., one of our Dad's sisters, had died that morning. She was 84 years old and had been very ill for some time; still, it came as a surprise, and although unlike my sister I wasn't really close with her, I was sad nonetheless and had a little cry in the privacy of my office.

Pastel sunrise that morning, as seen from my kitchen window.
Some time after 6:00, I left work and took a train into Stuttgart, where I was meeting a group of fellow Privacy Officers at a restaurant for informal exchange. This particular group meet once a month, but I went for the first time. It was nice and the food really good, but I am not going to join them every month - a few times a year will be enough.

My fried mushrooms with herbs came on a bed of roast spuds with Brezel crumbs - delicious!

It rained all day on Thursday (22 Feb.) and was very windy but mild at 11-12C/51-54F. For lunch, I met up with my Mum and her friend R at the "Vesperkirche". I posted about this particular charity project in 2012, when my Mum wrote this guestpost. Now that my Mum can't physically do the volunteer work any longer, at least we go there for a meal, and instead of the symbolic price of 1,50 € per meal, we pay 10 € and contribute in a small way.

The food was alright (you don't go there expecting a gourmet meal anyway) and the cakes for dessert were delicious. I walked there in the rain and back with only a sprinkle, so I had at least a bit of exercise on a day that was otherwise completely spent indoors.

On Friday (23 Feb.) I only worked a couple of hours early in the morning. Shortly before 10:00, my sister came to pick me up for the drive to a village about 30 km from Ludwigsburg, where we attended the funeral of a friend's mother. Never having met the deceased woman, we were there for our friend's sake, who appreciated our presence very much. Still, it was odd to sit in the small but packed church, listening to the non-religious speaker talking about a person we never met and knew very little about. 

At a quarter past 6:00 pm, the moon rose in the East - it was a lot "bigger" and more luminous really.
Back home at around 2:00 pm, I had ample time to do my weekly cleaning, shopping and get everything ready for the weekend. O.K. arrived at 8:30 pm.

Saturday (24 Feb.) was one of those days of fast-moving clouds when the light alters every few seconds. 

O.K. and I had a leisurely breakfast and then walked into town where we met my Mum and friend R at a historic palais, once belonging to an infamous (= unpopular) mistress of Duke Eberhard Ludwig, the founder of Ludwigsburg. Of course the building changed hands and use several times; it was lovingly restored to re-create some of its original character and is now the administrative seat of the Ludwigsburg Festival, an annual series of events spanning everything from theatre to opera to ballet to concerts.

They were having an Open House Day, and the offer of a guided tour with a historian was what we were most interested in. 

Grand staircase, heavily altered but still looking impressive.

Largest of the reception rooms, spanning the entire length of the upper floor.

One of the offices that used to be a smaller reception room.

Another office.

Manager's office. Not sure I would want to work surrounded by such vivid walls all day, every day.

After the tour and listening to live music from a (really good!) jazz trio, O.K. and I crossed the road to the palace grounds while my Mum and R walked the short distance to the shopping mall where my Mum had not been in a long time.




Back home from our walk in the park, O.K. and I had a little rest before I made dinner. Later, we watched a biopic about J.K. Rowling, "Magic Beyond Words".

Another luminous moonrise

The same view zoomed in

About two hours later, the moon was high up in the sky. To the naked eye, it looked perfectly round with a very clean-cut rim, not as fuzzy as my picture.

Because we had gone to bed relatively early the night before, we were up early-ish on Sunday (25 Feb.). It was mild, windy and sunny again, and after a brunchy breakfast with scrambled eggs, we set off to a walk along the top of the vineyards above the river valley to Marbach.






View from the footbridge to the railway bridge across the Neckar

A short stroll in Marbach's picturesque old town followed, with a little rest and coffees in a sunny spot, before we took the train back to Ludwigsburg. 


One stop before ours, it was announced that the train was stopping here for an unspecified time, "thanks" to people on the tracks. We did not feel like waiting without knowing how long for, and got off the train to walk the rest of the way. All in all, we had around 15.5 km under our belts that day - exhausted, but happy.

For our Sunday dinner, I cooked pasta and made a salad of baby spinach leaves, feta and tomatoes. O.K. left at 8:30 pm and was home in well under two hours. I am always relieved to get his "I'm home" message on those Sunday nights!