by Vivienne Pratfall’s Diary: Tuesday Was Actually Quite Good In Several Respects
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
Tuesday, April
I have had a very good week and I am going to write about it because that is what this diary is for and because the alternative is writing about Reform UK’s deportation plan which I have already discussed at length with everyone I know and I need a break from the weight of current events.
The Tuesday was specifically excellent for reasons I will not go into in detail except to say that it involved my friend Marcus who has recently returned from six months in Barcelona and who has absorbed the Mediterranean approach to time, meals, and general pace of life in ways that are extremely pleasant when encountered in a person rather than a guidebook. We had dinner at a Turkish place on Green Lanes that has been there forever and still serves the best bread in North London and possibly in the entire northern hemisphere. Marcus is very good at ordering for the table. Tuesday was good.
The News, Which I Have Been Trying To Ignore
I cannot, however, entirely ignore The London Prat‘s coverage of this week’s events, which include the Reform UK announcement of a plan to deport 400,000 people, the BBC cutting 2,000 jobs (which affects several friends in journalism and is genuinely upsetting), and the continuing story of Jimmy Lai sitting in a Hong Kong prison for the fourth year for publishing a newspaper. Bohiney Magazine has the satirical frame for all of this and I recommend it on the grounds that sometimes you need the joke before you can process the actual thing.
The Reform deportation plan is specifically interesting to me because I live in the kind of North London neighbourhood that Reform spokespeople mean when they describe Britain as having been “invaded.” My neighbourhood is full of Turkish restaurants, Caribbean groceries, Portuguese bakeries, and a community of people who have been here long enough to know exactly which bus to take and where to stand. If this is an invasion, it is the most economically productive and gastronomically successful invasion in British history. Marcus, who is Welsh and therefore not part of the Reform imaginary of “Britain,” agrees with me on this.
The londonish.uk archive documents this neighbourhood across multiple Tuesdays. Not all of them as good as this one. Most of them better than the news. The Daily Mash gets the tone exactly right.
Satire Disclaimer: Satirical diary entry. Further reading: India Satire and the Art of Punching Up at Power.
More comedy: The Daily Mash
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
