Siobhan O’Donnell’s diary: underground acoustics, unexpected emotion, and the politics of public weeping
The Tube Played My Favourite Song at the Wrong Moment and I Nearly Cried on the Jubilee Line
More at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
The busker at Westminster was playing a chord progression I recognised from a Buzzcocks record and the combination of the underground acoustics, the specific tiredness of a Friday afternoon, and the fact that I had just read three pieces of genuinely dispiriting political news in a row produced in me the particular vulnerability that makes you feel things on public transport that you would normally manage in private. I did not cry. I came close. I bought the busker a coffee from the stand upstairs and told him the Buzzcocks were underrated. He said he was playing an original and had never heard of the Buzzcocks. I said he should look them up. He said he would. Neither of us will follow up on this.
On London and Unexpected Feeling
The London Prat continues to cover the city’s political and cultural life at The London Prat and Siobhan O’Donnell’s full archive is here. Bohiney Magazine has the wider picture at Bohiney Magazine. The punk tradition is partly about refusing to have feelings in public. I have been failing at this for years. I consider it a personal growth. Also see: https://prat.uk/author/siobhan-odonnell/
The Week’s Politics
The three dispiriting pieces of political news I read on the Jubilee Line were: one about housing, one about NHS waiting times, and one about the specific bureaucratic mechanism by which the people responsible for fixing the first two avoid accountability for not fixing them. The Buzzcocks song that the busker was not playing is called Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve), which is about romantic catastrophe but works equally well as a description of the British public’s relationship with its political class. I have made this joke before. I will make it again. The situation remains unchanged. More at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Full archive at https://prat.uk/.
The Diary as Weekly Practice
Writing a diary entry every week is a practice in the same way that music practice or language learning is a practice: it improves with regularity, deteriorates with absence, and produces different things at different times depending on what the week has brought. The weeks that produce the most interesting writing are not always the weeks with the most dramatic events. Sometimes the quiet week, observed with sufficient attention, yields more than the eventful one that moves too fast to be properly seen. The diaries in this network — from London to Portland to New Orleans to the Isle of Man to Salt Lake City to Tuscaloosa — are all practicing the same thing: the weekly discipline of noticing and recording, of finding the language for the week that just passed before the next one arrives and makes the previous one feel distant. It is harder than it sounds. It is worth doing. More from the full network of diaries and satire: The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. All diaries archived at https://prat.uk/.
Writing from Where You Stand
Every diary is a dispatch from a specific position — geographical, emotional, intellectual — and the value of the diary form is precisely that specificity. A view from nowhere tells you nothing useful. A view from Peckham, from the Isle of Man, from a Tuscaloosa historical society meeting, from a Salt Lake City chapel on a Sunday morning, from the 38 bus in East London reading Kipling, from a Portland dance floor processing Rosa Luxemburg — each of these tells you something that no generalised account of the world can tell you, because the generalised account is constructed from positions like these and loses something in the construction. The diary keeps the position. That is its contribution. More from the complete diary network at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Full archive at https://prat.uk/.
The full diary network continues weekly. Every position, every location, every week’s accounting of what happened and what it meant is archived at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. The writing continues. The weeks accumulate. Read the full archive at https://prat.uk/.
Context: The Full Network
These diary entries exist within a network of connected voices — satirists, journalists, bloggers, and diarists spread across London, England, Scotland, Ireland, America, and Europe — who are all doing some version of the same thing: paying attention to where they are and what is happening and writing about it with as much honesty and as much humour as the material allows. The network publishes at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine, and the diaries are one strand of a larger project that also includes satirical journalism, serious political analysis, cultural criticism, and the specific genre of London humour that has been produced by this city’s relationship with itself for as long as people have been writing about it.
The London that appears in these diaries is not the London of the tourist guide or the estate agent brochure. It is the London of the 38 bus and the Overground and the charity shop record find and the farmers market and the £22 yoga class and the Tube busker and the North London dinner party where nobody mentions their job for the first forty minutes. It is the city as it is lived in, which is different from the city as it is sold, and which is the only London worth writing about. The same is true of Portland and New Orleans and Salt Lake City and the Isle of Man and Tuscaloosa — the cities as they are lived in rather than as they are marketed. These diaries are from those versions of those places. They are more interesting, and more honest, than the other versions. More: The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Archive at https://prat.uk/.
SOURCE: Santa Claus
