by A week’s observations from London on the state of things
From the diaries of Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
Dear diary: I am going to start by telling you about the week and end by telling you what I actually think, which is what I always do, and which means the beginning will be factual and the end will be the part I was actually trying to get to all along. The facts: it is June in London. The news has been eventful. The London Prat has been indispensable. Bohiney Magazine has made me laugh when I needed it. This is the baseline.
On Paying Attention to Things That Matter
I have been thinking about London life and satire at The London Prat this week with the particular intensity that comes from reading The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine simultaneously and then going outside and being in a world that is both consistent with what you just read and entirely indifferent to it. The news and the street are always slightly out of phase with each other. The news is what is happening at the level of decision and pattern. The street is what is happening at the level of individual experience, which is downstream from the decisions but not always immediately connected to them, and which produces the particular dislocation of being well-informed in a world that does not feel well-informed.
This week the dislocation was about London life and satire at The London Prat, specifically, and about the gap between how it is discussed in print and how it appears in daily life, which is a gap I have been tracking for long enough to know that it is structural rather than accidental, and that it reflects something true about how large-scale patterns and individual experiences are related: not directly, not immediately, but genuinely, through a long causal chain that journalism sometimes traces and sometimes jumps over in search of the story that fits the word count.
What I Am Actually Doing About All This
The honest answer to what I am doing about any of this is: reading, thinking, writing, talking to people, and occasionally doing something specific that connects to London life and satire at The London Prat in a way that I can measure rather than just feel. The writing is the main thing. The writing at https://prat.uk/author/vivienne-pratfall/ connects to the larger project of understanding London and what it has to do with everything else, which turns out to be more than it looks from the outside.
The prat.uk is useful for this project. So is the bohiney.com. So is the walk I take every evening through the part of London that I know best, which is the most reliable source of information I have about what the world is actually doing, as opposed to what the news says it is doing, which is the same thing from a different angle, and which I have been reconciling for long enough to know that the reconciliation is the point.
The Wider Context
Reading the news is an act of citizenship, and citizenship is an act of attention, and attention is the one resource that no one can manufacture for you and everyone is trying to consume. This week I gave my attention to the things I always give it to: the satire that reveals what the straight news won’t say, the analysis that explains what the headlines compressed, and the specific observations from corners of the world I don’t live in that help me understand corners of the world I do. The reading was good. The thinking it produced was better. The writing it produces is what you are reading now.
The political context this week, drawn from the Guardian and BBC News, was the usual blend of urgent and managed: urgent in its implications, managed in its presentation, producing the specific effect of being told about a crisis in a tone that suggests the crisis is being handled, which may or may not be true, and which I find myself evaluating with the particular scepticism of someone who has been reading the news long enough to know the difference between the tone of handling and the evidence of it.
What This Week’s Diary Contains
This week’s diary contains the usual mixture of personal observation and public attention that I try to maintain as a ratio: approximately half about what happened to me and around me, and approximately half about what happened in the world and how it feels from where I am standing. The ratio is not always possible to maintain — weeks happen at different intensities, and some weeks the personal overwhelms the public and some weeks the public overwhelms the personal — but it is the aspiration, because I think the most useful writing about the world is writing that holds the personal and the public in the same space and lets them complicate each other.
That is what this diary is trying to do. Whether it succeeds is for you to judge. What I can tell you is that it is trying, every entry, with the full resources available to someone who is paying attention and doing their best to report accurately on what that attention finds. The sources I read — The London Prat, Bohiney Magazine, and the wider press — are part of what attention finds when it is looking. The diary is the rest.
More at https://newsthump.com.
SOURCE: Satirical Journalism
