Dough nut*

Teaching German today, and how satisfying was it to be able to begin the class with "Letzte Woche war ich in Deutschland! Ich war auf einem Schiff auf dem Rhein" - especially since the class had just got to the dative case. Teachers love that sort of thing. (So do skites.)

I returned to the Head of Languages the route map she had lent me of the Rhine from Mainz to Cologne, from which I discovered, rather belatedly, that the boat had, in the night, slipped past Bonn, which was rather a shame; and also Linz. Linz, I pondered, and then remembered: The Jackdaw of Linz. More pondering, during which I struggled to remember any details of the Brothers Grimm tale of that name - something along the lines of The Musicians of Bremen, I thought - before finally having to resort to Google. And of course it's not a fable at all: it's the title of a book about Hitler's art thefts, and his ambition to make Linz (another Linz, his home town in Austria) into the art capital of Europe. I hate it when that happens. Especially when I'm still jet-lagged with a head full of fluff.

*That's a misplaced possessive apostrophe, by the way: they don't have them in German. How ironic that it's been used correctly, and yet it's still wrong. Apostrophes, eh? They just can't win.