SAY SO

Sunday -- to Grosvenor House, with cousin Jean to the Antiques Fair. My mother's new friend Mrs Koetser had asked me to see her son's stand at the show, which I did. Nice little 1650s Van Goyen -- v sketchy, grey-brown, a sledge at the edge of a river -- and other good Dutch and Flemish paintings. Then we moved onto the much larger Antiques Fair at Olympia, half-empty, but with some quite interesting things to see, especially some early 20thc Russians & a Miro collage in a stand of a gallery from Barcelona. On the way to that we stopped off at a smaller Olympia Hall, the Allergy Show, organised by Jean's son & his partner, this was crowded with families, and we were told it was much busier the day before: Snake-Oil City-- everything you can imagine being marketed to allieviate the widespread common symptoms of allergies.

The big news Monday was Michael Campbell's vicotry in the US Golf Open. Then it was family day, Sophie & Jonathan & Alice all gathered at my mother's flat. We went out to the High street for lunch at Cafe Rouge. The rest of the day was taken up with Wimbledon on TV. The early rounds focus on British players, because so few of them last into the 2nd week. & it seems necessary to be shown why.

It was also the day for International Latin at Cervia. Stefan on the phone in the evening sounded satisfied to have made the round of 48, placed 38th. The politics always figures in these competitions & his view was that the top 20 places were all 'taken', leaving only 4 more places in the round of 24. This kind of information, of course, never figures in the rankings or ratings. Tonight it's the Rising Stars Latin. I'll post the result here asap.

Heatwave continues, though there was a brief thunderstorm in London yesterday morning, which began the moment I came out of the launderette.