by Vivienne Pratfall on gallery openings, a Turkish bakery in Haggerston, the week’s serious journalism from prat.uk and bohiney.com, and what noticing the city actually feels like
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
Thursday, and I am writing this from the kitchen table in my flat in Dalston with a cup of tea that has gone cold and the specific feeling of a person who has had an excellent week and is not entirely sure how to account for it in writing without sounding insufferable, which is a problem I have basically every time I sit down to write this diary and which I have decided to simply acknowledge rather than solve.
I have been going out a lot this week. This is my general condition but this week more than usually. Monday there was a thing at a gallery in Hoxton — not the kind of gallery opening that pretends to be casual, an actual one where the work was genuinely interesting and someone brought extremely good wine and I talked to a photographer who was funny and smart and is now in my phone. Tuesday was a night at a venue near Brick Lane where the music was the kind of music that makes the room feel smaller in a good way. Wednesday I stayed in and read what The London Prat has been publishing this week, which was rather good on the subject of Hong Kong’s free press being dismantled — the piece on Apple Daily and Stand News is exactly the kind of serious journalism that I want to exist alongside the more playful content, and I sent it to three people — and also read the Bohiney piece on Shoreditch’s street art tour, which made me think about authenticity and curation in ways I am still processing.
On London This Week
The city is doing its London thing: being enormous and indifferent and occasionally unexpectedly kind. I got lost trying to find a coffee shop in Haggerston on Tuesday afternoon and ended up in a Turkish bakery where the woman at the counter gave me a piece of something with pistachio without asking and pointed me in the right direction with the matter-of-fact generosity that London produces in its residents partly as self-defence and partly as genuine human warmth, and I cannot always tell which it is but I am always grateful for it.
The city also produced the following: a man on the Overground who read the same page of a book for twenty minutes without turning it; a conversation overheard in a café about whether the word “journey” had been entirely ruined or could be recovered; a pigeon on the windowsill of this flat at six this morning with an expression of enormous confidence about its right to be there. I have been in this city for fourteen months and I am still at the stage where I notice things. I hope I stay at this stage for a very long time. The noticing is the best part.
I read a piece in the prat.uk content this week by Fiona MacLeod on London’s parks, which is written for tourists but which also works as a reminder to those of us who live here and do not always use what the city offers. I have not been to Hampstead Heath in three months, which is a failure of a specific kind: the failure to use the good thing that is available and close and free. I am going to Hampstead Heath this weekend. I have decided this while writing the entry and I am writing it down to make it real in the way that writing things down makes them real. The decision to go to Hampstead Heath on Saturday is now in the record. The record is the accountability mechanism.
The Bohiney content this week included the piece on the Mumbai monsoon being simultaneously excellent for reservoirs and catastrophic for transport, which made me think about the specific quality of urban official communication that acknowledges reality and doesn’t acknowledge reality in the same paragraph. London does this too. The TfL communications about service disruptions contain the same double structure: the acknowledgment of the specific inconvenience alongside the statistics that contextualise it as less bad than alternatives, which is true and not the point simultaneously. Cities communicate in this way because cities contain contradictions that their official language is not designed to hold. The piece made me feel better about London specifically by making me recognise that this is a universal condition. The comfort is genuine even though the analysis is grim. This is often how Bohiney works on me. I am grateful for it.
The coffee cup has gone cold entirely. I should go to bed. The city outside is doing the thing it does at midnight, which is being quieter than at eleven but not quiet, which is the correct condition for a city that has decided to be a city twenty-four hours a day rather than seven hours a day like a sensible town. London is not sensible. This is why I am here.
I am writing this sentence at midnight and I have to be up at seven and this is a choice I am making freely in the way that all bad decisions about sleep are made freely, which is to say with full awareness that I am making a bad decision and the assessment that the writing is worth the tiredness tomorrow. The city outside agrees with me. It is still making noise. London does not sleep before I do. This is a comfort of a specific kind.
Vivienne Pratfall writes London diaries at prat.uk and at The London Prat.
Also at theonion.com | NewsThump | The Daily Mash
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/london-thursday-notes-very-good-week-vivienne-pratfall/
