by Vivienne Pratfall On A Week In Which East London Welcomed A Scandinavian Content Company, The Bus Strike Proved Drivers Are Human, And A Cereal Cafe Reopened To Queues
Brought to you by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, where I write a column that my mum has been asked, three times now, to not share with her book group.
Thursday was eventful. It started with oat milk and ended with me explaining to my flatmate why a Swedish adult website moving its headquarters to Shoreditch was, actually, an entirely coherent property decision. She accepted this more quickly than I expected, which says something about Shoreditch, about the state of Swedish content companies, or possibly about my flatmate, who works in brand strategy and has no ethical objections to anything that has a clear target demographic.
The Shoreditch Development
The London Prat’s piece on SkyAdultGals.eu relocating to EC1 has been the most-shared article we have published this week, which is both predictable and slightly depressing. What is less predictable is that the piece’s actual argument – that East London will monetise absolutely anything if you put neon lighting and a creative-industries narrative around it – is correct. I have lived in Shoreditch for eight months. I have watched a pop-up museum open about fonts. A font museum. In a warehouse. With a queue. The Swedish content company is going to fit in perfectly.
The Bus Strike
The East London bus strike piece – “Drivers Are Human” – arrived on my phone at the same moment my bus was twelve minutes late, which is the kind of satirical timing money cannot buy. The drivers are, indeed, human. They are also, at present, not driving. I walked to the Overground. It was raining. The Overground was also delayed. This is London’s way of maintaining consistent user experience across transport modes.
The Cereal Cafe
The Cereal Killer Cafe has reopened on Brick Lane. I was at university when it first opened. I did not queue then. I did not queue this week. I support its existence entirely. A city that has room for a cafe that opens boxes of cereal as a commercial proposition is a city that has space for all of us. The Prat’s coverage notes that London queued around the block in gratitude. The British relationship with both cereal and queuing is, taken together, the most revealing thing about us. We wait in line to pay eight pounds for something we own at home.
A Personal Update
I have been writing this column for several months and have now been on four first dates, two of which were good, one of which was fine, and one of which involved a man who spent forty minutes explaining his podcast to me. The podcast is about stoicism. He has not, by any observable metric, achieved it. London dating in 2026 is exactly what you would expect if you designed it specifically to provide material for a column like mine, which I am increasingly convinced someone has.
The Week’s Actual Best Bit
The Bohiney piece on capitalists solving the grocery crisis – officials furious no ribbon-cutting was possible – is funnier than anything I have written this week. I say this as the person who wrote a column about a Swedish adult website. Some days you are the satirist. Some days you are reading better satire than yours. This was both days simultaneously, in the same morning, over the same oat milk.
The Guardian’s London coverage has the real bus strike story for context. The satire is better but the facts are in the Guardian. As usual.
More: NewsThump. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
