K 406

We've just had a lively bunch of musicians in the house, who descended on Castres to play some chamber music concerts with Lowri. The tour covered Croze (Lot), Saint-Pompont (Dordogne), Saint-Gaudéric (Aude) and Vénès (Tarn) on successive days. Herne went on tour with them and must now know this music better than any other nine year old on the planet: a Mozart quintet, Brahms B flat major sextet, and Strauss sextet from Capriccio. I made it to the last two concerts: a real treat to hear such good music, so well played.

As it happens, I recently brought home a miniature score of the Mozart, bought second-hand in England for the bargain price of 10 pence. It's in excellent condition, right down to the slip inside it still advertising new releases for 1917.

World of Silicon

I'm writing this on the New Laptop which I bought last weekend. The Old Laptop has been seriously misbehaving: not a good idea during the summer holidays when there is serious contention for computer time at home. Since I was visiting Purley, my father kindly gave me a lift to PC World and settled down to watch the Olympic cycling on a display of 30 large flat screen TVs while I got stuck in to the computers.

I wanted to buy in England because then you get an English keyboard. I am not good with French keyboards because the keys are all in different places and I end up typing a load of Qs instead of As. It's also nice to have software talking to you in English rather than French. I ended up with an HP Pavilion Entertainment PC which has a decent sized screen and a numeric keypad, useful for the occasions when I do want to type in French (Alt-130 and all that). It works (phew), and I am online (double phew).

Timeo Danaos

My hotel in Zagreb last week was next to a grand edifice, the Mimara art museum. I was one of the few visitors and wandered round the antiquities, medieval polychrome wood carvings and old masters alone. The museum was opened in 1987 to house the collection given to the nation by Ante Topic Mimara. The leaflet given out to visitors is gushing:

"This publication provides us with a further opportunity to express publicly our gratitude and our appreciation of our late donor, Ante Topic Mimara, who has placed his nation and the city of Zagreb in his debt by a noble gesture - the gift of his magnificent art collection ..... He was a man of subtle taste with an innate sense of true beauty and the harmony of aesthetic experience, a cosmopolitan spirit, to whom no expression of true artistic worth was alien .... It is certain that his personality, his intelligence and the nobility of his purpose will remain for ever present in the display, the richness and the beauty of these works of art."

No information, though, about who he was or how he acquired the means to build this collection of over 3,750 works, or where it came from. Curious, I googled him and came up with an article by Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which describes him as

"a scam artist, art thief, art forger, a master spy for Tito, a KGB agent and perhaps a killer"

Which is a rather different assessment. Hoving's article alleges, in some detail, that Mimara stole hundreds of works of art from the Collecting Point, the Nazis' central repository in Munich for works of art seized during the war. There's another long article entitled The Master Swindler of Yugoslavia on lootedart.com which sets out Mimara's villainy and dismisses many of the works as fakes. Intriguingly, the collection includes paintings which used to belong to Martin Boorman and Hermann Goering.

So maybe this is why no-one visits the museum: it's a highly visible embarrassment for the city.