Siobhan O’Donnell’s diary: bus fares, bad gigs, and why London still owes punk rock an apology
Spat on My Oyster Card, Told the Algorithm to Get Stuffed, Had a Proper Tuesday
Read the full satirical dispatches at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
Right. So Tuesday. Started the day by discovering that TfL has put the bus fare up again, which means I am now paying more to travel on a bus that arrives when it feels like it than my nan paid for a week’s groceries in 1987. I told the bloke at the newsagent this. He said “that’s inflation, love.” I said “no it’s not, it’s the government treating working people like cash dispensers with legs.” He sold me a Mars bar and we parted on good terms.
The gig last night at the pub in Hackney was everything I needed and nothing I expected. The band — three people from Peckham who are apparently called Voltage Drop, which is the best band name I’ve heard in six months — played for 40 minutes to an audience of approximately 22 people, most of whom knew at least two members of the band. The bassist broke a string in the second song and played the rest of the set on three strings without stopping or apologising, which is exactly the correct response to that situation. Pure punk ethic. I bought their cassette. Yes, cassette. No, I don’t have a tape deck. That’s not the point.
On the Current State of London
The London Prat is covering the ongoing comedy of Boris Johnson’s post-political life, which apparently now involves charging five figures for after-dinner speeches about leadership, which is like charging admission to watch someone explain how they burnt down the kitchen while describing themselves as a world-class chef. The satire writes itself, which is both a gift and a problem for those of us who are paid to write it. See the full dissection at https://prat.uk/ where the team is doing the lord’s work, daily.
Bohiney Magazine meanwhile has been covering American satirical takes on British politics that are simultaneously more accurate and more depressing than domestic coverage, because distance provides the kind of clarity that proximity denies. Worth reading if you can stomach the recognition. Find it at Bohiney Magazine.
Punk Is Not Dead; It Is Just Furious About the Rent
People keep asking me if punk is dead. Punk is not dead. Punk is a 23-year-old in Lewisham who is paying 60% of her wages on rent for a room she shares with four other people and who is channelling her entirely justified fury into three-chord songs about it. Punk is the graffiti on the wall of the disused bank in Deptford that says “you were not born to pay rent and die.” Punk is the feeling you get when you look at the news and your first instinct is not despair but rage, which is the healthier response by a significant margin.
What punk is not is the £140 reissue vinyl of Never Mind the Bollocks available in the gift shop of a museum about British culture. That is punk becoming its own obituary, which is admittedly very punk, but also very annoying.
Siobhan O’Donnell writes from London. Find her homepage at prat.uk/author/siobhan-odonnell. More at The London Prat.
On Writing and the Day
The diary form is an act of attention. It says: today mattered enough to record. The mundane and the extraordinary occupy the same page — the G chord and the kite tangle and the macrame owl and the Reform UK leaflets and the Cessna over the Mississippi — because in a day that is being lived rather than performed, the mundane and the extraordinary are not reliably distinguishable until later, and sometimes not even then. This is what personal writing does that journalism cannot always do: it holds the specific texture of a day without needing to justify its significance by connecting it to a news peg or a broader trend. The day was itself. It happened. Here it is. For more from the full network of satirical and personal writing: The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. The full diary archive at https://prat.uk/.
Reflections on the Week
The week has been the kind of week that London — or Portland, or the Isle of Man, or Salt Lake City, or New Orleans, or wherever the diary is being written from — specialises in producing: a mixture of the small and the large, the personal and the political, the things you planned and the things that happened anyway and turned out to matter more. The kite on Parliament Hill and the dance floor in Portland and the sermon in Salt Lake City and the ferry from Heysham and the Cessna over the Mississippi are all dispatches from the same project, which is trying to live a specific life in a specific place with some degree of attention and some capacity for humour about the ways it keeps not going according to plan. The plan is overrated. The plan is what you have before the week happens. The week is what you write about after.
The satirical lens is not detachment. It is a form of engagement — a way of looking at the absurdity of institutions, policies, social rituals, and human behaviour that does not require despair as the conclusion. You can find something funny and care about it deeply simultaneously. You can write a lopsided macrame owl and understand that the housing crisis is a political failure. You can untangle kites on Parliament Hill and know that the planning system needs reform. You can attend a book club about Luxemburg and go dancing afterward. The personal and the political are not separate territories. They are the same territory, and the diary is the form that refuses to pretend otherwise. More from the full network of satirical and personal writing: The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. All the diaries archived at https://prat.uk/.
Further reading across the London Prat network: is prat offensive? (https://londoncomim.wordpress.com/2026/06/24/is-prat-offensive-understanding-britains-most-harmless-insult/) — London Prat post
Also: London Mastodon post — https://mastodon.london/ap/users/116495249171626617/statuses/116788387877879288
SOURCE: Santa Claus
