University’s all French to me

Also this week: losing to my daughter, and puffed-out Paris policemen

If it’s Monday, it is three hours of linguistics. And if it’s Friday, two and a half hours of French; no English allowed. At the age of 60, I have embarked on a BA degree in French at Birkbeck, University of London, and I have frappé the ground running, as the French probably don’t say. Friday is by far the hardest. Under the tutelage of the good-humoured Agnès, and her electronic whiteboard that doubles as a screen (forget blackboard and chalk), we watch chic women and sexy men (this is France), disseminating cultural issues in extremely rapid French. Then we discuss what we think they are saying, while Agnès giggles.

I have been a Francophile since buying that Serge Gainsbourg single at the age of 14, and the four-year syllabus beckons me with thrilling promise. The reality is slightly tougher than the dream. I only achieved O-level in French and have totally forgotten how to use the indicative. If I ever knew. After the video, we engaged with 14 different ways to say “when”, including the mysterious au fur et à mesure que, which I will obviously never knowingly use in conversation. “Il faut toujours utiliser un dictionnaire, Rosie,” sighs Agnès as she pings me back my homework on Turnitin (get it?).

Coming full circle

I don’t really like art fairs, but at Frieze Press Day, I hoped I would see someone I knew. And lo, there was Paul Hedge of Hales Gallery, whom I interviewed 25 years ago for my book on the YBA phenomenon, The Tastemakers. Hedge has ridden the vicissitudes of the market brilliantly, and his stand included a £65,000 Ken Kiff painting. “I started out as a postman, and St James’s Square was in my round, including a gallery where I saw Ken Kiff for the first time,” he said. “I told the gallerist: ‘When I open my own gallery, I will show Ken Kiff.’ He laughed and said to his friends, ‘The postman is going to have a gallery, don’t you know!’” Hedge smiled. Last year, Hedge took over running the entire Kiff estate. Tee hee.

“Take your shoes off and stand in the dome”

The antithesis of the art fair is the domestic show. My Islington neighbour, the artist Markus Hansen, a former assistant to the great modernist Joseph Beuys, has built a huge dome in his basement. It is called Dusk Pavilion. “Take your shoes off and stand in the dome,” he advises. I stand in the middle of a dark rotunda. Nothing happens. I lie down. Suddenly, blinding light for about eight seconds. I stand, and see my body “printed” on the white floor, like a murder victim. The whole vault has been painted in luminous paint. The light flashes again. What larks! I move around the dome, leaving fading handprints that look like those on the caves at Lascaux.

Dusk Pavilion is part of “ROUTE 19”, a show inspired by the number 19 bus route (which goes through Islington). “It cuts a perfectly plotted trajectory through the best and worst of London,” says the curator, Adrian Dannatt; the show gives “a deeper understanding of the city’s unique character”. The main exhibition at Mayfair’s Belmacz gallery (near the Green Park stop on the number 19 route), includes work by Grayson Perry, Allen Jones and Peter Doig, who all live near the infrequent presence of this bus.

Big weekend for Paris

Royal property now has a secondary value as race tracks. London has the Royal Parks half marathon, but Paris hosts La Grande Classique, a ten-miler that is shorter, and far more glamorous, as it goes from the Eiffel Tower, via a colossal hill, to the Palace of Versailles. I ran it with my daughter, Honey, who beat me by about 20 minutes.

Abandoned by my child, I ran alongside the local police, who are fit enough to deal with the hill, but not the Louvre. Apparently a cyclist saw the jewellery thieves clambering into the museum and called les flics, but they arrived trop tard.

High drama

The day of the heist, we were at the Bastille to see Paris Opera’s new production of Aida. Lovely show, terrible audience. I was sitting alongside a grim trinity: someone with a fan, someone with a working phone and someone chewing gum. The god Ptah was thence invoked alongside Alex Ferguson-style mastication.

The next morning, I ran to the Louvre. I looked up at the crime scene. There was no sign of the break-in. Outside, Paris is rainy, beautiful, comme d’habitude. Chic women plus tiny dogs. Men in slim suits plus bikes. An advert for a jewellery store, “Contemporary mountings of antique artefacts”, summarised what might become of the stolen stones.

Rosie Millard writes “The Arts Stack” on Substack

[Further reading: Chris Kraus’s autofictional crimes]