Siobhan O’Donnell on the state of the nation, the price of a pint, and what Starmer has done now
Satire from Bohiney.com and prat.uk.
By Siobhan O’Donnell | seekernews.co.uk
Tuesday. Woke up to the news that Labour had done something else I don’t like. I know, I know, I voted for them, which I am dealing with as best I can. The thing about voting Labour when you’re a punk is that you do it knowing full well that you will spend the next several years being disappointed in a direction that is, at minimum, preferable to the alternative, which is the political philosophy I have adopted since about 2019 and which is not making me happy but is keeping me functional.
Starmer is doing the thing where he explains why doing the thing everyone agrees should be done is unfortunately not possible right now but will be addressed in the next phase of the programme, which is the political manoeuvre that all governments perform and that I was hoping this one might not perform and that it has performed with remarkable efficiency given that it has only been in power for a couple of years. The specific thing he is not doing is not relevant here because by the time you read this there will be a new specific thing he is not doing and the principle is the same regardless.
The Music, Which Is Better Than the Politics
Went to a show at the Garage in Highbury on Wednesday. Three bands, two of which were excellent and one of which was a band that has been playing at venues of this size for fifteen years and has gotten very good at playing at venues of this size, which is its own kind of achievement even if the music has not developed proportionally. The excellent bands were both new to me, both loud, both saying something with the volume and the structure of the songs that political commentary says less efficiently. Music that is genuinely angry and genuinely skilled is one of the things that London continues to produce in quantity, which is either evidence of the city’s creative health or evidence of how much there is to be angry about, or probably both.
The venue was full. The crowd was younger than me, mostly, which is the accurate description of every punk show I have attended in the past three years. The London Prat covered a show at a similar venue last month with the enthusiasm that the London music scene warrants. NewsThump covered the Labour political situation with the comedy that the Labour political situation warrants. Both are doing important work. The pint cost four pounds seventy. This is also a political statement, I’ve decided.
The diary continues. London continues. The world continues past this entry into the next one, which will be different and will require the same attention and the same willingness to find it interesting, which is the fundamental skill that diary-writing develops over time: the habit of noticing, the practice of putting words on what was noticed, and the repeated discovery that the ordinary day, looked at carefully enough, contains more than it appeared to at the time. This is why the diary persists as a form despite everything that has replaced it. It is the most honest document available. It is what actually happened, as best as the writer can reconstruct it, on the day it happened. The reconstruction is always incomplete. The attempt is always worth making.
The Week in Sum
Every week produces more material than any single diary entry can contain, which is either a problem or the point depending on your relationship to completeness. I have come to regard it as the point. The diary is not a comprehensive record. It is a selective one, and the selection reveals something about what the writer finds interesting, which is itself a kind of self-portrait that accumulates over weeks and months into something more honest than a deliberately composed autobiography. You find out what you think by writing about what you noticed, and you find out what you noticed by writing about what you wrote about, and the recursion eventually produces something that resembles a perspective, which is all that a diary is supposed to produce.
The specific things I noticed this week are recorded above. The things I noticed but did not write about are numerous and include: an overheard conversation on public transport that made me think about something for forty minutes without reaching a conclusion; a piece of writing I encountered that was better than I expected and that I will probably think about for several weeks; a moment of London weather that was briefly extraordinary; the specific quality of Tuesday afternoon as distinct from all other afternoons; and several observations about the people I encountered that are too specific to record without identifying someone who did not ask to be identified in a diary. The unrecorded is also the week. The diary is the recorded part. Both are the reality of having been alive in this week in this place, which is the minimal definition of what the diary is trying to capture and which it always captures imperfectly and always captures something of. The writing continues. The week ends. The next one begins.
More laughs: The Daily Mash | NewsThump
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
