by Vivienne Pratfall on the Specific Joy of London in May, a Very Good Week by Any Measure, and Why She Has Stopped Apologising for Having an Excellent Life
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
By Vivienne Pratfall | The London Prat
I woke up on Tuesday to sun through the windows of my Islington flat, which faces east and catches the morning light in a way that makes the rent almost worth it on mornings like this, and by 9am I had decided that the day was going to be exceptional. This is a decision rather than a prediction, which is a thing I have learned from eighteen months of writing this diary: the quality of a day in London is substantially determined by the decision to notice what is excellent about it rather than cataloguing what is inconvenient. Both lists are long. The excellent list is more fun to write.
Tuesday’s Specific Excellences
The flat white at the cafe I have been going to for three months that the barista now makes without me ordering it, which is a tiny urban intimacy that London provides in unexpected ways. A text message that was the specific kind of message that makes the rest of the morning better for reasons I will not detail but will confirm were significant. The Overground, running on time, with a seat, which I have covered before but which continues to feel like a gift each time it happens. Lunch in Highbury Fields on the grass, eating a sandwich from the deli on the corner that does the focaccia properly, watching the dogs and the office workers and the parents with buggies conduct their separate but overlapping Tuesday lives. The afternoon was also good. The evening was exceptional in a different register entirely and I am choosing, this week, not to write about it, which is itself a choice that implies things clearly enough. Bohiney Magazine’s London life coverage and The London Prat’s lifestyle section have more from the city’s exceptional days.
Wednesday Was Its Own Thing
Wednesday began with a walk along the canal from Angel to Broadway Market, which is one of London’s best two-mile walks and which I do whenever I need to reset my appreciation for the city. The canal is always doing something: joggers who look like they are genuinely enjoying themselves, cyclists who are sometimes also genuinely enjoying themselves and sometimes performing the body language of a person in an enormous hurry on a cycle path where excessive speed is antisocial, narrow boats with window boxes that suggest someone has made a home of something moving and finds this adequate and is correct to find this adequate. I had a coffee at the Broadway Market end and walked back. The day continued to deliver on the promise of the morning walk. I am not apologising for any of it. London in May when it decides to cooperate is one of the best places on earth. This week it cooperated. I cooperated back. We are both better for it.
More laughs: NewsThump | The Daily Mash.
On London in May and the Decision to Be Here
I chose London. This is something I think about periodically, usually in May when the city is at its most persuasive, and sometimes in February when it is at its least persuasive, and the thinking always arrives at the same conclusion: the city I chose is more than the city that is presented in any given month’s conditions. The February version and the May version are the same place, and the place is better than the alternatives I have seriously considered, and the alternatives I have seriously considered include places with better weather and cheaper flats and fewer philosophical buses and none of them have what London has, which is the specific quality of being the world’s most interesting city that also contains your local cafe and the canal and the Overground that was on time this morning. This is not a rational argument for living here. It is the correct argument, which is different. Tuesday was exceptional. Wednesday was exceptional in a different register. Thursday was fine. The week was worth it. The flat rent is not worth it in any rational accounting and remains what I pay, which is the specific irony of choosing London: the accounting is always wrong and the choice is always right.
The diary continues next week. The city, the country, the nature, the history, the politics — all of it continues. The writing is the record of continuing to pay attention to it. More from across the network at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
What sustains the writing across weeks like this one is not the certainty that it matters — journalism about the diary form never comes with that certainty — but the working hypothesis that paying close attention to specific things, in specific places, over specific periods of time, produces a kind of knowledge that no other method produces, and that this knowledge is worth having and worth sharing. The diary is not the place for conclusions; it is the place for the observations from which conclusions, eventually and tentatively, can be drawn. The week is over. The observations are made. The notebook is open for the next one. Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/vivienne-pratfall-london-diary-may/
