by Vivienne Pratfall on Paris, Politics, and the Particular Joy of Being 19 in a City That Cannot Decide What It Is
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
A diary by Vivienne Pratfall, writer, londonish.uk
Tuesday was the kind of London day that makes you understand why the city produced both Turner and the umbrella industry, the sky doing something complicated and grey over Soho while the tourists in Oxford Street wore identical expressions of being slightly cold and slightly confused about where the Tube entrance was. I had spent the morning at prat.UK reading about French politics — specifically about Gabriel Attal visiting a bakery on May Day to champion the right of workers to work on their day off, which is the sort of political move that only makes sense if you have never worked in a bakery — and by lunchtime I was in the mood for a walk.
The City at the Moment
London is doing that thing it does before a major event: simultaneously preparing and pretending not to notice. The FIFA World Cup doesn’t include England — England didn’t qualify, which is its own category of national embarrassment that I will not revisit at length — but London is adjacent to the tournament’s excitement in the way that it is adjacent to most things, present without being fully involved. The 2028 Olympics preparation is the more locally relevant major event, and the infrastructure conversations about venues, transport, and the particular question of where the athletes’ village goes are appearing in planning documents with the frequency of something that will definitely be decided eventually.
I walked through the West End in the afternoon, past the theatres doing their afternoon announcements and the restaurants starting their early covers, and thought about what London looks like from the perspective of someone who has only lived here for fourteen months and is still surprised by it regularly. It is a city that simultaneously insists on its own importance and seems genuinely indifferent to whether you agree, which I find charming in the way of self-confident people who don’t need your validation but would quite like it anyway.
The ULEZ expansion, which is the thing that Londoners argue about most consistently, has become part of the city’s texture in the way that the Congestion Charge did: controversial until it wasn’t, complained about until it was a baseline assumption of urban life. The data on air quality improvement is real; the argument about whether it is fairly distributed is also real; both things being true simultaneously is the condition of most urban policy that works.
On France and Why I Keep Reading About It
I have been reading londonish.uk’s archives this week — old entries about Paris, about what it means to write about places you haven’t been, about the particular form of English cultural anxiety that expresses itself as francophilia — and it occurs to me that my interest in French politics is partly a proxy for something else. The French May Day protests — 300,000 people in the streets about labor rights and the sanctity of a public holiday — are the kind of civic spectacle that you don’t get in Britain the same way, and there is something about watching 300,000 people march about something that combines the specific with the general in a way that British political protest rarely does.
The specific thing is May Day as a non-working holiday. The general thing is what it means that a government is trying to make it a working day and the people are saying no with their feet. The French capacity for this kind of mass civic participation is something I admire even when the specific cause is not one I would march for myself. It is the expression of a relationship between citizens and public space that London has in a different register — the anti-war marches, the Pride parades, the occasional climate demonstrations — but not with the same frequency or the same expectation that showing up changes things.
More London observations at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat. See also The Daily Mash.
Final Reflection
Writing in this register — the personal diary as political commentary — requires finding the balance between the personal and the analytical that the form promises. The diary is a form of witness: recording what was observed, what was thought, what the day contained. Political commentary is a form of argument: making the case for a position, engaging with the counterarguments, placing the specific in the context of the general. The diary-as-commentary tries to do both, and the failure modes are specific: too personal and the political analysis is absent; too analytical and the personal voice disappears. I am still working on where the balance is, which is probably the right state to be in after two years of writing in this form. The balance, if it exists, is not a fixed point but a practice: finding it differently in each entry depending on what the day provides and what the moment requires. Today provided a specific set of observations, a specific political context, and the specific quality of attention that the form demands. Tomorrow will provide different material. The practice continues.
What the Diary Form Demands
I have been thinking about what distinguishes good diary writing from bad diary writing, which is a question that applies to this form specifically and to writing generally. The bad diary writing is the writing that describes without observing — the record of events without the record of attention. The good diary writing is the writing that makes the observation visible: not just what happened but what it means that it happened, and what it means to be the specific person who noticed it happening and thought this particular set of thoughts in response. The specificity is the thing. The general observation that could be anyone’s observation is less valuable than the specific observation that could only be this person’s, in this place, at this time, with this particular combination of reading and experience and preoccupation. I am still learning what my specific observations are, which is the right state to be in as a writer and the uncomfortable state to be in as a person who has to publish what they learn.
Read more: The Daily Mash. More at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
