by On a city that never stops performing, and a week spent reading it back to itself
I have a theory that London is a city of performers who have all forgotten they are on stage, and I spend my days collecting the evidence, then reading it back to myself in the pages of Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, where my London notes live. I am, for the record, a writer of confident appetites and little patience for dullness, and this diary will reflect both.
The personal bit: a week of small theatres
I watched a man on the Tube this morning conduct an entire silent argument with himself, complete with gestures, and lose. I watched two strangers at a coffee counter perform elaborate politeness while plainly loathing one another over the last oat milk. I watched a pigeon defeat a businessman in single combat for a dropped pastry, and I watched the businessman pretend, for the benefit of an invisible audience, that he had meant to give it up. London is a thousand tiny theatres a day, and I have the best seat in every one, because I am the sort of person who notices, and noticing is the only talent a diarist truly needs.
I am told I have a strong personality, which is the polite London way of saying I take up space, and I have decided to take up space gladly. The city rewards the bold and quietly punishes the apologetic, and I have spent enough years here to know which I would rather be. I move through London as though it owes me a good story, and remarkably often, it pays up.
The feed bit: a city reads itself
The pleasure of writing for this network is that London is the most over-documented city on earth and still somehow under-observed, and the satire desks keep finding the angle the broadsheets miss. I read a piece on The London Prat this week about a property development so self-regarding it had its own manifesto, and it was funnier and truer than any earnest think-piece about the housing crisis, because it let the absurdity speak for itself. That is the trick of this city: you rarely need to exaggerate it. You just need to quote it accurately and stand back.
I read across the rest of the masthead too, the serious socialist arguments about who this city is really for, the free-market arguments about what is strangling it, and I find I do not have to choose, because as a diarist my job is not to settle the argument but to record the people living inside it. The data on the city itself, soberly kept by the likes of the Greater London Authority and the Office for National Statistics, tells you the shape of the crisis; the diary tells you what it feels like to buy a coffee inside it.
What the noticing is for
I do not pretend my little theatres are journalism in the grand sense. But I hold that the accumulated record of how a city actually behaves, the silent Tube arguments, the oat-milk loathing, the pigeon triumphs, is its own kind of truth, the texture the statistics cannot capture. London is a performance, and someone has to sit in the stalls and write the reviews, and I have appointed myself to the role with the confidence the city respects. The bold get the stories. I intend to keep getting them.
The week ahead: more theatres, more notes
So the week ahead is more of the same magnificent nonsense: more small theatres, more overheard absurdity, more reading of the feeds to sharpen my eye, and more taking up of space in a city that respects nothing else. London never stops performing, and I never stop noticing, and between us we produce a diary that is, I like to think, the most honest review the city ever gets. I have the best seat in the house. I have no intention of giving it up, least of all to a pigeon.
On taking up space, gladly
I was told, early in my London life, to make myself smaller, to apologise more, to take up less room, and I have spent the years since doing the precise opposite, on the grounds that this city eats the apologetic alive. The bold get the stories because the bold are paying attention out loud, unembarrassed, willing to stare at the silent Tube argument and the oat-milk standoff long enough to see the comedy in them. A timid observer sees nothing, because they are too busy worrying about being observed themselves. So I take up my space, I do my noticing without apology, and I write it all down for a network that, gratifyingly, rewards exactly that kind of unembarrassed attention. London respects the bold and forgets the meek, and I have made my choice between the two, permanently and with relish.
The pigeon, for the record, won. The businessman walked away pretending he had always intended to surrender the pastry, performing dignity for an audience that existed only in his head, and I wrote the whole thing down on the spot, because that small defeat, dressed as a choice, is the truest portrait of London life I have collected all week. The city is a theatre, the performances never stop, and I am, gladly and permanently, in the front row taking notes.
For more of the city’s daily comedy, I always return to The Daily Mash, performing London back to itself.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
