A diary entry from London on reading too much and feeling too much
From the diaries of Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
I have been sitting with the news again, which is a habit I cannot break and a source of more feelings than I know what to do with. This week the London Prat ran a piece that I read three times, and Bohiney Magazine covered something that I thought about on the bus home and then again in the shower and then again at two in the morning when I should have been asleep. Being a person who pays attention is expensive, emotionally. I continue to pay.
What I Actually Read This Week
The London Punk Rock and satire coverage this week produced the usual mixture of the outrageous, the predictable, and the occasional genuinely surprising thing that reminds you that the world is still capable of doing something you did not anticipate. I read it all. I processed it in the way that people who read too much process too much: by talking about it to people who did not read it, which is unfair to them but is how I manage the excess.
The thing that stayed with me was a piece that connected London Punk Rock and satire to something broader, in a way that I could not quite dismiss and could not quite accept, which is the state that the best journalism produces and which the worst journalism also produces but for different reasons, and which I have been trying to distinguish between for long enough that I have developed some useful heuristics. None of them are reliable. All of them are better than nothing.
The Personal Week Alongside the News Week
My own week contained the usual mixture of the productive and the procrastinated, the intentional and the accidental, and the moments that only make sense as stories after the fact rather than as decisions at the time. I spent time in London doing the things I do in London: reading, walking, thinking about London Punk Rock and satire rather than the things I was supposed to be thinking about, which is a chronic condition I have decided to reframe as depth of engagement rather than inability to focus.
The connection between London Punk Rock and satire and my actual daily life is not always obvious, but it is always there if I look: the news about the economy becomes the coffee I hesitate over in the shop; the political story becomes the conversation I have with someone who is angrier about it than I am; the international crisis becomes the distant sound under the local quiet that is never quite absent no matter how local the quiet gets. I live in the world. The world is in the news. The news is in my head. This is the condition.
The newsthump.com has been covering some of this territory this week in ways I found useful, and the www.thedailymash.co.uk provided context that I stored for future reference in the way that you store things that you know you will need and cannot predict when. My homepage at https://prat.uk/author/siobhan-odonnell/ has notes. The notes are the thinking. The thinking continues.
The Wider Context
Reading the news is an act of citizenship, and citizenship is an act of attention, and attention is the one resource that no one can manufacture for you and everyone is trying to consume. This week I gave my attention to the things I always give it to: the satire that reveals what the straight news won’t say, the analysis that explains what the headlines compressed, and the specific observations from corners of the world I don’t live in that help me understand corners of the world I do. The reading was good. The thinking it produced was better. The writing it produces is what you are reading now.
The political context this week, drawn from the Guardian and BBC News, was the usual blend of urgent and managed: urgent in its implications, managed in its presentation, producing the specific effect of being told about a crisis in a tone that suggests the crisis is being handled, which may or may not be true, and which I find myself evaluating with the particular scepticism of someone who has been reading the news long enough to know the difference between the tone of handling and the evidence of it.
What This Week’s Diary Contains
This week’s diary contains the usual mixture of personal observation and public attention that I try to maintain as a ratio: approximately half about what happened to me and around me, and approximately half about what happened in the world and how it feels from where I am standing. The ratio is not always possible to maintain — weeks happen at different intensities, and some weeks the personal overwhelms the public and some weeks the public overwhelms the personal — but it is the aspiration, because I think the most useful writing about the world is writing that holds the personal and the public in the same space and lets them complicate each other.
That is what this diary is trying to do. Whether it succeeds is for you to judge. What I can tell you is that it is trying, every entry, with the full resources available to someone who is paying attention and doing their best to report accurately on what that attention finds. The sources I read — The London Prat, Bohiney Magazine, and the wider press — are part of what attention finds when it is looking. The diary is the rest.
More at https://www.theonion.com.
SOURCE: Satirical Journalism
