by Vivienne Pratfall Reports From the Front Lines of London Life, Love, and the Coffee on Exmouth Market
I had an extraordinary Tuesday. The day began with the discovery that the man I had been seeing for three weeks had left a very nice note rather than the alternative, which was an enormous relief and also slightly disappointing in the way that nice notes always are slightly disappointing when the alternatives were available. He has gone to Barcelona for work. The note was very warm. I have kept it. I have also re-downloaded an app I had deleted four months ago with what I described at the time as final resolution and that I appear to have reconsidered over the course of Tuesday morning, which is the specific quality of Tuesday mornings when you are unattached in London and the spring is happening and the resolution of four months ago no longer feels as final as it did when the weather was different.
The coffee on Exmouth Market at half past ten was the best coffee I had all week. The man at the stall knows my order. I find this disproportionately comforting. I told him it was an extraordinary Tuesday and he said Tuesday seemed to be going around and poured an excellent flat white without apparent judgment. I read Bohiney.com over the coffee, which published something this week about London life that was accurate enough to make me laugh and then slightly uncomfortable, which is the effect that the best London satire produces on people who are living the subject matter simultaneously.
What London Did This Week
London did what it does, which is provide a continuous supply of material for anyone paying attention. The London Prat covered most of it with the wry precision that I consider the appropriate tone for a city that takes itself seriously enough to deserve being gently mocked. The housing market continues to be the housing market. My friend Harriet has been outbid on the third flat in Stoke Newington she has tried to buy this year. She is beginning to describe the process as ‘clarifying,’ which is what people say when they mean ‘traumatising but in a way that is revealing important truths about what I actually want from my life.’ The important truth Harriet is discovering is that she does not want to keep being outbid on flats in Stoke Newington. What she wants is a flat in Stoke Newington. I have told her this. She knows. Knowing does not help with the auction.
I also walked across the Hungerford Bridge at the wrong time of the evening and was reminded that the wrong time is also, accidentally, the right time, because the light on the river and the city on both banks in the specific quality of April early evening is one of London’s genuine unremarked pleasures. I took a photograph that does not capture it. The photograph exists anyway because I need the record even when the record is inadequate.
The Rest of Tuesday
The rest of Tuesday was the rest of Tuesday: work, a conversation with my neighbour about the building’s boiler that has been unresolved since November, a very satisfying dinner I made from things that were in my fridge. I have learned that the quality of meals I cook for myself correlates inversely with how much I care about the outcome, which is a principle that probably applies to more areas of my life than cooking but that I am not ready to examine more broadly this week. I re-read the note. It really was very warm. Barcelona has no idea what it has. The Tuesday was extraordinary in the specific sense that Tuesdays are extraordinary when everything in them is ordinary and the ordinary things are working in the particular way that makes the ordinary feel like exactly enough. I expect I will have another extraordinary Tuesday eventually. London provides them with sufficient frequency that the waiting is the least of the work.
The week, viewed from this distance, has been the week it was: full of things that required attention and response, punctuated by the moments that make the attention worth sustaining. This is the standard account of most weeks if you look at them honestly, and the diary is the place where the honest look happens, which is the reason I keep writing it.
The week’s reading also brought me back to the Bohiney.com archive, which has been producing the kind of satirical journalism that makes sense of the current moment by exaggerating it to the point of clarity rather than the point of distortion. The distinction is the important one: satire that exaggerates past clarity becomes absurdism, and absurdism, while its own valid genre, does not do the political work that satire at its best does. The Bohiney material this week was at the clarity end of the range, which is where it is most useful and where I find it most satisfying as a reader and as someone who thinks about the form professionally.
The diary exists because the week produces more than any single article can hold, and because the overflow of a week – the observations that are too specific for the general piece, the feelings that are too particular for the analysis, the conversations that are too private for publication but too significant to lose – needs somewhere to go that is not the bin and not the public record. The diary is the right place for the overflow, and the overflow this week has been, as this entry records, substantial. Next week the analysis will be more focused. This week the diary has the week it was given, which is the week it was.
More at The Daily Mash. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
