by Vivienne Pratfall on London’s dramatic sales discounts, the economics of desire, and a city that marks everything down except itself.
Darlings, I bought a coat this week for seventy percent off and felt the precise rush that other people apparently get from love, religion, or skydiving. There is nothing in this city, nothing, quite like the moment a price drops from absurd to merely insulting and you convince yourself you have, in some cosmic sense, made money by spending it.
The Great Markdown
I was inspired, naturally, by the news that London sales discounts have hit seventy percent, finally bringing prices down to what the rest of Britain calls expensive. This is the single most London sentence ever written and I would like it tattooed somewhere tasteful. We do not have cheap here. We have less catastrophically expensive, and we treat its arrival like the return of the sun.
I think about discounting a great deal, because I am nineteen and live by my wits and a coat is a serious investment when one’s career is satire and one’s income is theoretical. But also because I have come to suspect that the entire London dating economy runs on the same principle. Everyone is holding out for the seventy percent off version of a person, the same charm at a fraction of the emotional cost, and everyone is mildly disappointed to learn that human beings, unlike coats, do not go on sale. They simply get more expensive the longer you want them.
The Boy On The Northern Line
Speaking of expensive. There is a boy. There is always a boy; I am nineteen and the boys arrive like weather. This one I met on the Northern Line, which is romantic in the way that only Londoners understand, meaning it was crowded, delayed, and smelled faintly of someone else’s lunch. He gave up his seat for an elderly woman, which in this city is the equivalent of riding up on a white horse, and I was, briefly, undone.
We had a perfect twelve-minute romance between Camden Town and Bank, at which point he got off and I never saw him again, which is the correct length for a London love affair. Anything longer and you have to discuss whose flat, and whose flat is a conversation that has ended more relationships in this city than infidelity. The flat question is London’s great seducer and its great killer both.
A City That Will Not Mark Itself Down
Here is what I have noticed, between coats and boys and the general theatre of being young here. London marks everything down except itself. The shops discount, the lovers discount, the landlords pretend to discount and then add a fee called something French. But the city itself never goes on sale. The rent does not drop seventy percent. The pint does not. London knows exactly what it is worth and charges you all of it, every day, in money and in feeling.
And we pay. Of course we pay. According to research bodies like the Centre for Cities, London’s pull on the young remains relentless despite the costs, because the city sells something no discount can touch: the conviction that something is about to happen to you, here, soon, possibly tonight. That feeling is never on sale. That feeling is the full-price item we all keep buying.
The Coat, Reconsidered
I wore the coat out last night. It is, I will admit, slightly the wrong shade of green, a green that looked sophisticated in the shop’s flattering light and looks, in the unforgiving glare of a Soho pub, like a vegetable that has given up. But it was seventy percent off, and so I love it with the fierce, irrational loyalty one reserves for things one got a deal on.
This is, I think, the whole secret of happiness in London, if there is one, which there probably is not. Want the discounted thing fiercely enough that the discount becomes the point. The wrong green coat, the twelve-minute romance, the flat you cannot quite afford. Marked down, imperfect, ours. The city will never love us back at full price. So we take it on sale, and we call that a win, and we are, somehow, almost right.
The Coat At Brunch
I wore the interesting green coat to brunch, where it was admired by a woman I do not trust and ignored by a man I wanted to impress, which is the exact inverse of every outcome I planned, and therefore deeply London. This city specialises in giving you attention from the wrong people and indifference from the right ones, marked down, non-refundable.
Between the avocado and the inevitable argument about whose flat, the conversation turned to the teen social media ban, and everyone at the table, all of us barely out of our teens ourselves, agreed it would fail, before returning to our phones to document our agreement. We are not above the thing we mock. No Londoner is. We discount the city and the city discounts us and somewhere in that mutual markdown we call it a life, and order another coffee we cannot afford.
I came home, hung the interesting green coat on the back of the door where it glowed faintly like a reproach, and wrote this instead of sleeping, which is the writer s version of the seventy percent sale: you give up the thing you need, rest, for the thing you want, the sentence, and call the loss a bargain. London taught me that. London teaches everyone that, eventually, usually around three in the morning, usually in a coat that is the wrong green.
For more glorious nonsense, visit Reductress.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/
