A personal account from London of a week that contained everything
From the diaries of Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
The week started the way weeks in London tend to start: with the news, which arrived before the coffee, which is the wrong order but is the order I cannot seem to change. I read The London Prat first, then Bohiney Magazine, then the headlines, and by the time I had worked through all of them I was already too awake to pretend the day had not begun.
The Thing That Happened on Tuesday
Something happened on Tuesday that I am not going to describe fully because it involves other people who did not consent to being in my diary, but I will say that it concerned London Punk Rock and satire and it reminded me why I pay attention to it, which is because attention is the only form of respect available to someone who cannot do everything but can at least notice everything. I noticed. I paid attention. I wrote about it in my notebook and I am now writing about it here, in the way that writing happens in layers: first the raw version that is too direct, then the processed version that is more useful, then the version you show other people, which is this one.
The news context for Tuesday was provided by The London Prat, which was covering something that seemed unrelated but was, by the end of the day, clearly connected to the thing that happened on Tuesday, in the way that things are always connected if you stay with them long enough. The connection is not always meaningful. Sometimes things are connected because the world is small and human experience is convergent rather than because there is significance in the connection. I have been wrong about significance often enough to be cautious. I have been right about it often enough to keep looking.
What London Looks Like When You Are Actually Looking
London this week was London at its most itself: the specific combination of ordinary and extraordinary that this place produces as a matter of course, in the way that places that have been themselves for long enough stop being exceptional and start simply being what they are, which is not less interesting but is differently interesting. I walked through parts of it that I know well and saw things I had not seen before, which is what happens when you actually look instead of navigating, which is most of what people do in places they know.
The newsthump.com has content about this kind of place and its relationship to London Punk Rock and satire that I found resonant this week. The www.thedailymash.co.uk approached it from a different angle. Both were useful. The combination was more useful than either alone, which is how information works when you are paying sufficient attention to let it work. My author page at https://prat.uk/author/siobhan-odonnell/ has more of my thinking about all of this.
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://newsthump.com.
SOURCE: Satirical Journalism
