Some beautiful things to look at

The advertising algo on Insta has spent years circling me like a hapless admirer in a romcom, continuously getting it wrong. No I will not respond sexily to some unsolicited sponcon for under-7s boxing classes in York, I moved down south thirty years ago and my kid is 14. And no, I do not want the woollen jumper from And Other Stories that I have already bought, it’s May now, thanks all the same. And yes I did flirt back with the COAT paint adverts initially, but now they’ve started coming so thick and fast that I’ve been able to examine their colour names in some detail, and

Old Street
Dalston Chat
Algorithm
and Voicenotes

just aren’t getting me or my walls wet. I’ve already wasted what feels like the best part of my adult life in some kind of post-Shoreditch chronically online east London media node naffoverse, I don’t think I need it writ large all over my living room. “Yeah it was a toss-up between Voicenotes and Old Street but we decided to go with Algorithm in the end,” I will not be saying at my next Dalston chat.

(I live in Dalston now, so if you signed up to this mailout because you liked it when I lived in Primrose Hill, well unfortunately that makes two of us.)

So it is with utter delight that the algo has finally worked and something wonderful has appeared in my timeline!

It’s Bonhams, the auction house, who’ve been bamboozling me me with images of their upcoming Greek art auction in their Paris branch. These paintings and sculptures, which are either by Greeks or of Greece, have become my waking obsession.

There’s some Alekos Fassianos - if you’re ever in Athens, might I recommend his beautiful museum - and they’ve also got Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas, an artist closely associated with my beloved island of Hydra and whose descendant Ioanna Gika is one of my favourite people from when I lived in LA.

Obviously I’m not going to buy any of it, so in that respect, the advertising algo has failed. An enormous plumbing crisis just hit my flat straight after my lovely upstairs neighbours and I hired contractors to repoint all of our brickwork and restore the windows, so there’s no money left at all. There’s negative money. A brand new boiler and taps and pipes and a large minus sign hovering over my life.

But gawping is free, such as at this view of Athens by Michalis Georgas, lot 95.

Phwoar.

Or Fotis Kontoglou:

Or yer man Ghika whom I just mentioned, lot 79:

This sculpture:

And this beautiful sketch of Zante by Edward Lear!

I grew up with Edward Lear!

Well, not literally.

But this book was our family bible because the man invented limericks and The Owl and the Pussycat, which I went on to read aloud at my brother’s wedding, even managing to do the “O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love, what a beautiful Pussy you are,” to a crowded church beside the Thames while keeping my professional poker face on.

It was a different time.

Or there’s this painting below of the harbour in Hydra. The island that stole both mine and my daughter’s heart a decade ago and that I now can’t stop taking her to if I wanted to, because she would kill me.

And let’s face it, she’s got previous on this subject:

And now for the gossip (including about that death threat photoshoot) for which you have to pay. SORRY.