by Vivienne Pratfall on love, cereal, bus strikes, and the specific way London makes everything simultaneously wonderful and terrible
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
This Week Was Everything and Also a Bit Much
Okay so the week started with me and Theo having the most incredible Tuesday (I will not say more because some things are private even for this diary but I will say: Tuesday was a very good day) and ended with me standing in the rain at a bus stop because the East London buses were on strike and my phone was dying and the only place I could find to charge it was a Pret a Manger where I had to buy a coffee to use the socket and then I accidentally fell asleep and missed the diversionary service and had to walk twenty minutes in the actual rain. This is London in one experience. Perfect and then rain.
The big cultural event of my week was the Cereal Killer Cafe reopening on Brick Lane, which I went to with my flatmate Jess on Saturday morning because we are the target market (young, easily charmed by nostalgia for things that existed before we were fully conscious, willing to pay £3.50 for a bowl of Lucky Charms). The queue was twenty minutes but the Lucky Charms with chocolate milk were actually excellent and the cafe is so determinedly cheerful inside that it is impossible to be even mildly cynical in there. I took approximately forty photographs. Seventeen of them were good. One of them was genuinely great. Theo liked all forty.
The News, As Filtered Through My Week
I am aware that there are things happening in the world beyond my week. The Bohiney analysis of Britain’s decline is ongoing and I have read enough of it to know that the situation is, broadly, being managed with the enthusiasm of someone who has been managing something for a long time and has reached the stage where managing has become its own activity rather than a means to an end. The BBC is raising the licence fee to £180. This seems like a lot. I watch a great deal of BBC iPlayer. I am not sure what the right number is but I am prepared to discuss it.
The bus drivers who were on strike this week were, according to everyone I spoke to including the man at the bus stop who lent me his portable charger (his name was Darren and he works in insurance and he was very kind), entirely in the right. Drivers are human. This is apparently a radical idea. The London Prat covered the bus strike with appropriate attention to the radical idea that drivers being human should have been obvious without needing a strike to establish it.
Theo is taking me to see a band in Bethnal Green on Friday. I have been to three concerts this month. My ears are tired and my heart is extremely full and I live in London at nineteen and I genuinely cannot imagine living anywhere else. Even in the rain. Even when the bus does not come. The cereal was good. Darren the insurance man’s charger worked. Tuesday was wonderful. This is my week.
More London life at londonish.uk | The Daily Mash
