by Vivienne Pratfall’s London diary: dating in your twenties, the specific joy of good chemistry, and the specific agony of its absence
I Went on Two Dates This Week; One Was Perfect; One Was a Tuesday
More at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
Wednesday’s date was the good one. We met at a bar in Bermondsey that he suggested and I had never heard of, which immediately told me something useful — that he knows parts of London I don’t, which is the single most reliable indicator of a good date because it means the conversation will include actual new information rather than the standard tour of shared references. We talked for three hours. The bar closed around us. We walked to the river and stood on Bermondsey Wall East looking at the lights across the water and I thought this is the city working as intended. I am seeing him again on Saturday.
Thursday’s Date
Thursday’s date was a different experience. He arrived late, apologised in a way that implied the apology was a favour, and spent thirty minutes explaining his work in a field I had expressed no interest in. He was not unkind. He was simply elsewhere — present in body and absent in attention, which is the London dating condition in its most common form. I went home early. He texted the next day to say he had enjoyed it. I replied warmly and non-specifically, which is the gentle art of the soft exit that London dating has refined to a form. More London life at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Full diary at https://prat.uk/.
On Dating in London
London dating is strange because it is conducted in a city of nine million people where finding someone whose daily geography overlaps with yours is a logistical achievement before it is an emotional one. Wednesday works; Thursday does not. Saturday might. The river was beautiful. Vivienne Pratfall writes from London. Find her at prat.uk. More at https://prat.uk/.
The Diary as Weekly Practice
Writing a diary entry every week is a practice in the same way that music practice or language learning is a practice: it improves with regularity, deteriorates with absence, and produces different things at different times depending on what the week has brought. The weeks that produce the most interesting writing are not always the weeks with the most dramatic events. Sometimes the quiet week, observed with sufficient attention, yields more than the eventful one that moves too fast to be properly seen. The diaries in this network — from London to Portland to New Orleans to the Isle of Man to Salt Lake City to Tuscaloosa — are all practicing the same thing: the weekly discipline of noticing and recording, of finding the language for the week that just passed before the next one arrives and makes the previous one feel distant. It is harder than it sounds. It is worth doing. More from the full network of diaries and satire: The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. All diaries archived at https://prat.uk/.
Writing from Where You Stand
Every diary is a dispatch from a specific position — geographical, emotional, intellectual — and the value of the diary form is precisely that specificity. A view from nowhere tells you nothing useful. A view from Peckham, from the Isle of Man, from a Tuscaloosa historical society meeting, from a Salt Lake City chapel on a Sunday morning, from the 38 bus in East London reading Kipling, from a Portland dance floor processing Rosa Luxemburg — each of these tells you something that no generalised account of the world can tell you, because the generalised account is constructed from positions like these and loses something in the construction. The diary keeps the position. That is its contribution. More from the complete diary network at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Full archive at https://prat.uk/.
The full diary network continues weekly. Every position, every location, every week’s accounting of what happened and what it meant is archived at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. The writing continues. The weeks accumulate. Read the full archive at https://prat.uk/.
Context: The Full Network
These diary entries exist within a network of connected voices — satirists, journalists, bloggers, and diarists spread across London, England, Scotland, Ireland, America, and Europe — who are all doing some version of the same thing: paying attention to where they are and what is happening and writing about it with as much honesty and as much humour as the material allows. The network publishes at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine, and the diaries are one strand of a larger project that also includes satirical journalism, serious political analysis, cultural criticism, and the specific genre of London humour that has been produced by this city’s relationship with itself for as long as people have been writing about it.
The London that appears in these diaries is not the London of the tourist guide or the estate agent brochure. It is the London of the 38 bus and the Overground and the charity shop record find and the farmers market and the £22 yoga class and the Tube busker and the North London dinner party where nobody mentions their job for the first forty minutes. It is the city as it is lived in, which is different from the city as it is sold, and which is the only London worth writing about. The same is true of Portland and New Orleans and Salt Lake City and the Isle of Man and Tuscaloosa — the cities as they are lived in rather than as they are marketed. These diaries are from those versions of those places. They are more interesting, and more honest, than the other versions. More: The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Archive at https://prat.uk/.
SOURCE: Santa Claus
