We spent all day at the Kunsthal, which had kindly invited the entire senior management of the RA to compare notes on our respective operations, as well as provide somewhere to discuss key priorities for next year. They run 25 exhibitions a year on a staff of only 38, on subjects which are wider ranging than ours, including Dinosaurs, James Bond and Jean-Paul Gaultier as well as Munch, Giacometti and Henry Moore. It’s in a building by Rem Koolhaas, opened in 1992. The big difference is that 47% of their funding comes from the city, and less than 1% from Friends:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
There’s clearly no gettin away from Gormless, though speriamo this one don’t collapse like the one in Kimmeridge Bay did a couple of weeks ago; it might cause more serious damage, though if it landed on someone in Rotterdam I’m told there’d be a 50 per cent chance it’d be a fellow-foreigner.
and i’m fifty per cent dutch…