I recently came back from my holidays in Skiathos and had a tremendous time. Normally I wouldn’t mention the finest beaches in Greece, the mouthwatering grilled black bream with lemon and olive oil and the smell of pine on those balmy summer nights. These are the things commonly associated with Greece and are to be expected.

Also to be expected, unfortunately, are small, pine effect, mosquito infested, plumbing affected accommodation … Not anymore, the Cape Pounta Villas are the finest on the island, with a commanding view, great pools and little touches such as the Korres products in the bathrooms, state of the art home entertainment and the most comfortable cocomat beds. The owner, Diamantis, has built these villas and furnished them beautifully and I would recommend them to anyone (which I am).

So if you are planning on going to Greece and there are upwards of four of you then it may be worth looking at these. Here is the link and an aerial view is above.

http://www.capepountavillas.com/

Gullwing doors. Hot. Fact.

I went to Las Vegas last week. Here is me in a photograph in one of the casinos, wearing a suit. Erm…that’s it.

Ahem. I have been absent from the blog of late; happily we’ve been very busy here at Blackbridge Inc. and while I’ve been up to all kinds of stuff from going to my first boxing match to seeing an awesome jazz gig to eating lobster in East London to watching Arsenal thoroughly not win the league, I have been not really writing about it.

But anyway, we are where we are. And I went to the National Portrait Gallery on Sunday. My co-visitor was mainly keen on taking photos of the ears of marble busts and examining any paintings of lace; that said,we both paid attention to a great exhibition they have of portraits from the first part of the 20th century - everybody from Kingsley Amis to General Montgomery, Walter Sickert to TS Elliot. I also saw a bust of Sir Noel Coward, taken from a face mask - he was a tiny man. Tiny.

Talking of ‘the Master’, I read over the weekend that the 19th of April is “record shop day”. Sad that it has come to that really; they’re dropping like flies. The best record shop I ever visited - or rather the shop with the best owner I ever met - was in Fargo, North Dakota, as in the Coen Brothers film. Previously, this guy had a shop in Minneapolis where I was living and a friend of mine knew him; he’d left the Twin Cities record community under a bit of a cloud in a dispute over the ownership of a Beatles Butcher cover. I was going up that way to see my then girlfriend’s parents and managed to persuade her that a two hour diversion followed by a similar amount of time looking through a room of dusty records was perfectly acceptable. What can I say? ‘4 Weddings and a Funeral’ had just come out in America and my stock has never been higher.

My friend had called ahead to say we were coming and in my girlfriend’s Honda Civic we headed north. A bit too slowly as it happened; we must have left late and were still miles away when my hard-fought diversion was cancelled despite my very best Hugh Grant-esq pleading. I called my friend when we got to Crookston (home of the world-famous Sugar Beet Museum) and he promised to ring Jim and say we’d come back on Sunday for definite. Sure enough, a couple of days later we left early and got to the place in a little strip mall in Fargo and sure enough Jim was there. A friendly fellow, grizzled hippy-type. “I’ve just got here myself, Keith said you were coming today so I went and got a twelve pack” - a twelve pack! - “while I waited for you”. I was glad he had; I went through his records while drinking his kindly offered bottles of Miller and found some brilliant stuff: Shamek Farrah’s ‘First Impressions’ on Strata East, a psych-rock Loading Zone album (that Youtube clip is WELL weird), a great Jackie and Roy album, lots of soul - hell, he even threw in three Dean Martin records for my girlfriend as “today is his birthday so they’re free”; it probably wasn’t his birthday.

What I also picked up and probably paid a couple of dollars for were some records as unlikely to end up in a North Dakota record shop in the midday sun as I was, two albums by the aforementioned Noël Coward, both of which - by coincidence - I had listened to while lounging on Saturday afternoon.

The Live in Las Vegas one is superior; it’s absolutely hilarious. And surprisingly risque for the time, I can’t recommend it enough. Best of all is his update of Cole Porter’s ‘Let’s Do It’ - I read a great biography of Porter while on holiday in Spain a few years ago and it listed quite a few of the wonderfully salacious unpublished lyrics from his more intimate live performances. I’ll perhaps not mention them all here.

Right. That’s it for now, more next week. Honest.

No, i am not referring to the tasty vodka-based cocktail or handy DIY tool. I am in fact referring to a label my friend and I were wrongly branded with upon our most recent trip to a motor-racing event. It seems people think that girls who profess an interest in motorsport are only interested in the drivers and not the cars. While I can’t deny that the eye candy isn’t a bonus, it is not the main reason for the somewhat recent development of my passion for all things car.

If you’d have told me five years ago I’d be paying to go and watch cars go round a track I would have laughed in your face (or more likely poured forth some torrent of expletives, as is my want). My best friend at uni, Annabelle, was a massive F1 fan, and still is, and I used to mock her come race day when i encountered her in the corridors of the halls of residence with cotton wool in her ears. This was, she explained, because she had recorded the race and didn’t want to inadvertently hear the result before she’d had a chance to watch it. ‘What a fool’ I mused. Little did I realise I would soon be acting in a similar fashion (minus the cotton wool) a few years down the line.

It was thanks to Annabelle’s love of the sport and another good friend of mine working in the industry that I started to actually pay more attention to F1 in particular to see what the fuss was all about and once I started watching I became addicted and now I am a self-confessed motor-racing geek. This addiction is what found me, up at 3.30am on Sunday, Red Bull in hand, very excited to watch Hamilton stick it to Ferrari in the first race of the season.

Whilst watching races on TV is all good fun, nothing compares to experiencing the F1 circus first hand. I can say that my trip (with my F1 buddy Annabelle) to the Italian grand prix at Monza in 2006 was without a doubt one of the best holidays I’ve ever had. Sitting on the pit straight, I experienced one of the most amazing sounds - an F1 car going full tilt literally 10 feet away. I thought my eardrums were going to burst but I was hooked! Not only are the cars awesome the fans are exceptionally friendly, like a happy community of like minded people. All the more so when we all stormed the track after the race and stood under the podium when Schumacher was spraying the champagne (you wouldn’t be allowed to do that in England…)

This September I’ll be returning to Monza and I can’t wait, not only will it bring back great racing memories, it will also make me smile as on our inaugural trip Annabelle and I (using our feminine wiles) managed to gatecrash the GP2 end of season party where a certain Mr Lewis Hamilton was partying hard having just won the GP2 championship and learnt that he was going to debut in F1 the very next year…

Camden! I was talking to someone the other week about how when you’re in your early teens, Camden Market seems like the most amazing place in the world - remember the sensory overload when you turned right out of the tube station and headed up to the market? It felt kind of dangerous. Edgy. And there were goths. In fact, I’m starting to feel that the Brick Lane area is becoming a bit like it; maybe it’s the influx of an element of society I recently overheard being described as “all those crustie Euros”.

Of course, there still remain a few good reasons to go to NW1: the Jazz Cafe (though I try and boycott it on principle owing to their greedy ‘booking fee’), Primrose Hill - the hill not the terribly precious conurbation bit - and there’s a pub I quite like on Delancy Street, a road name I’ve long been a sucker for; though having also been to Delancy Street in NYC, while I appreciate Lorenz Hart hasn’t felt any balmy breezes blow there or indeed anywhere else recently, it sure ain’t fancy any more. On that theme I did go and have a Chinese meal on Mott Street and while I wish I could say it was incomparable, I just remember the menu being somewhat tricky to navigate.

Anyway, I didn’t go to Camden this weekend, but I did go to the Camden Town Group exhibition at Tate Britain. It’s great. And isn’t all ambiguous if disconcerting scenes of the artists’ charladies in drab bedrooms, though there were plenty of them. Indeed, appropriately enough considering last week’s blog, there were also several of Walter Sickert’s famous if somewhat murky paintings of the clientele and the stars of London’s music halls.

Outside of his paintings Sickert is probably best known today because of the American crime writer Patricia Cornwall’s theory (and book) about him being Jack the Ripper. I read that book - for sale in the Tate shop oddly enough - very quickly while on holiday in Paris and it is worth a look though I was somewhat underwhelmed by her evidence. I think it is safe to say that she really, really wants it to be true.

I’m going to see Arsenal play Blackburn Rovers now. Not in Miami, Hong Kong or Tokyo either. Not yet.

Oh, and as *insert ‘first signs of spring’ cliché here* I found myself humming the old standard ‘Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most’ this morning on the way to work; a lovely song whoever does it (though Mark Murphy does it the bestest) and particularly loved by me for the inspired couplet which rhymes “College girls are writing sonnets” with “but I’m up on the shelf with last year’s Easter bonnets”.
More next week.