I never much liked abstract art but Bridget Riley turned the tide for me

I found myself happily proven wrong in a Margate gallery – no, not that one (Matthew Collings’s controversial Drawings Against Genocide, across town). Instead I had gone, dutifully, to Turner Contemporary, which stretches its cool, metallic angles out on to the grey sea, trying to impose some order on it. Inside were Bridget Riley’s bright stripes and dizzying polka dots.

My boyfriend was overjoyed. He is far more forgiving of abstract art than I am – the kind of person who can stand very still in front of a canvas and claim to feel something profound. I tend to want drama, faces, just something to latch on to. And yet Riley got me. In her vibrating, almost aggressively bright combinations. It stopped being just shapes and came alive.

Just across the beach, the same feeling returned. Margate’s tidal pool – a big, blunt concrete structure – had filled with water at exactly the right moment, turning into a perfect mirror of the sky.

“The pleasures of sight,” Riley reminds us, “are sudden, swift and unexpected.” Stumbling out of the gallery and desperate for coffee, I found the cafe was serving the same small-batch beans as back in east London. Inside, tattooed types in ballet flats and skirts over jeans hovered by the counter, chatting about their meditation practices.

Even the wine-and-small-plates place from my own neighbourhood had opened an outpost here, and one of the Broadway Market jewellery stalls had made the journey too.

They call it Hackney-on-Sea. All the same, just lightly salted.

Back home, a collective sadness had descended over my friendship group. Carolyn Bessette and JFK Jr have finally died in Ryan Murphy’s sickly sweet retelling of their tragic romance, Love Story, leaving a new generation bereft. When the show first screened I was stubbornly against it. The Kennedy family was ultra rich, arguably destroyed US healthcare and had been cruel to women. Why would I watch a puff piece about them?

But boy was I wrong. Something about the world it conjures, the incredibly sleek hair and minimalist apartments, is mesmerising – it’s like watching a fantasy version of adulthood where there’s no such thing as worrying about paying your heating bill. I’ve even started wearing a CBK-style headband.

At least two of my friends have begun dating “biker boys” (men who, like JFK Jr in the show, cycle everywhere), and I’ve noticed a worrying increase in backwards caps of the sort he wore. When you spot one, just know their wearer is probably emerging from a TV binge.