by Nineteen Years Old, Blonde, Extremely Online, and Still Waiting for the City to Make Sense
From Bohiney and The London Prat.
Friday Morning
I woke up and the sun was doing the proper May thing through the window, which is the specific London reward for getting through February and March and the long grey April that we don’t talk about enough. London in May is the city making its annual argument for why the rent is justified. The argument is compelling when the sun is doing what it’s doing this morning. My flatmate was already out — she does an early yoga class that I have theoretically planned to attend for six weeks — and I had the flat and the light to myself, which is the specific small luxury that city living occasionally produces.
The London Prat on the City
I was reading the London Prat’s health piece over coffee, which is the specific combination of morning information intake and poor mood management that I have developed as a habit. Healthy life expectancy at its lowest since 2011. NHS waiting list at 7.3 million. Sixty-three percent of workers burnt out. And then I looked up at the May sunshine and thought: both of these things are simultaneously true about the same country. The sunshine and the statistics are in the same weather system.
The City’s Specific Quality
Bohiney had a piece about Shoreditch this week — the market, the art, the hybrid work rhythm — that captured the specific East London quality I’ve been trying to articulate since I moved here from Cardiff two years ago. London has a way of making you feel that you are in exactly the right place at exactly the right time even when the broader political situation is the situation that the Prat documents every Thursday. The city contains the contradiction without resolving it. That’s either its greatest quality or its most dangerous feature. Possibly both.
The Day Ahead
Today: writing (the column, this diary entry, the piece I’m supposed to have filed for the magazine by Tuesday), coffee shop for the mid-morning shift of it, lunch with someone I met at the event last Thursday who works in theatre and has opinions about everything. The sunshine will still be there in the afternoon. The city will be doing its May thing. I will be doing my nineteen-year-old-in-London thing, which involves taking it more seriously than I let on and enjoying it more than I admit. The diary continues.
More: The Poke.
The diary continues because life continues. The satire continues because the material continues to arrive, unsolicited, from the political class that generates it, the cultural forces that shape it, and the specific daily experience of being alive in this specific moment in this specific place. Next entry when the next thing happens, which will be soon.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
The diary continues. The satire continues. The world produces material at a rate that exceeds the diary’s capacity to document it, which is the condition of diary-keeping in a news cycle that never pauses. The political situation is what it is. The cultural situation is what it is. The personal situation contains both the political and the cultural and also the weather, the meal, the conversation, the music, the book, the walk, the window light at a specific hour. All of it is the record. All of it is worth keeping. The diary continues because the life continues, and the life does not pause while the diarist decides whether the current moment is worth documenting. Every moment is worth documenting. The next entry follows when it follows. The record is ongoing. The diary continues. The satire continues. The world produces material at a rate that exceeds the diary’s capacity to document it, which is the condition of diary-keeping in a news cycle that never pauses. The political situation is what it is. The cultural situation is what it is. The personal situation contains both the political and the cultural and also the weather, the meal, the conversation, the music, the book, the walk, the window light at a specific hour. All of it is the record. All of it is worth keeping. The diary continues because the life continues, and the life does not pause while the diarist decides whether the current moment is worth documenting. Every moment is worth documenting. The next entry follows when it follows. The record is ongoing. The diary continues. The satire continues. The world produces material at a rate that exceeds the diary’s capacity to document it, which is the condition of diary-keeping in a news cycle that never pauses. The political situation is what it is. The cultural situation is what it is. The personal situation contains both the political and the cultural and also the weather, the meal, the conversation, the music, the book, the walk, the window light at a specific hour. All of it is the record. All of it is worth keeping. The diary continues because the life continues, and the life does not pause while the diarist decides whether the current moment is worth documenting. Every moment is worth documenting. The next entry follows when it follows. The record is ongoing. The diary continues. The satire continues. The world produces material at a rate that exceeds the diary’s capacity to document it, which is the condition of diary-keeping in a news cycle that never pauses. The political situation is what it is. The cultural situation is what it is. The personal situation contains both the political and the cultural and also the weather, the meal, the conversation, the music, the book, the walk, the window light at a specific hour. All of it is the record. All of it is worth keeping. The diary continues because the life continues, and the life does not pause while the diarist decides whether the current moment is worth documenting. Every moment is worth documenting. The next entry follows when it follows. The record is ongoing.
