Confession time . . . I have become something of a Kommissar Beck fan. The series is anything but an advertisement for Sweden, red houses and all. I find the scenery very depressing and they don't seem to film anything in the summer. Perhaps that's because there isn't much of one to begin with.

I am a huge mystery fan generally, having grown up with BBC rebroadcasts of "Mystery!" on PBS - I still remember hurrying to shower and wash my hair before the show started and watching with my sister and my parents, something of a family ritual.

The German is baking; he is darling (invoking the 6 month rule). My parents did quite a bit to whipe our wedding wish list clean and we now have the super-duper mixer of our dreams that will accomapany us for many years of happy baking. We've had it a little more than a week and we've already had toll house cookies, a cake and now oodles and oodles of German Christmas cookies. This losing weight thing isn't going to procede very far if he keeps this up.+

Tatort on Sunday (almost this evening) will be from our neck of the woods - Karlsruhe/Mannheim/Ludwigshafen!