A week of art

This week Sotheby's and Christie's have their annual sales for Impressionists and Modern Art. I like to attend at least a couple of them, not only to see what's happening in the art world (prices) but also as an amateur auctioneer, to see if there are any new techniques that I ought to be thinking about. I went to Christie's on Monday evening and saw the Monet (estimte £12m) go for £18m, and several other pictures pass their high estimates. There is suddenly a new group of buyers who have arrived in the market in the last few minutes, and if the bubble bursts, we will see these pictures come back onto the market in a couple of years. Those of us who have been collecting for years can't complain, as the young turks have put considerable added value to our collections. The best picture of the evening for me was a wonderful Miro, Le Coq, which sold for £6,628,000 - almost twice its low estimate. I can remember when you could pick up a Miro for a quarter of a million. Gone are the days. And no doubt there are those old enough to remember when you could pick them up for £5,000.

I had to leave early to have dinner with Michael Beloff, who's not only one of my oldest friends, but always has a legion of stories about what's happening in the law courts and at the Olympics, where he's one of the British representatives. Such is his devotion to track and field that he'll be travelling to Osaka in Japan for the world athletics championships this summer, while I will satisfy myself by watching them on tv.