by A Satirical Diarist Confronts the Uncomfortable Reality of Professional Admiration
By Vivienne Pratfall | Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
I read Asha Mwangi’s piece on West London last week and spent twenty minutes feeling very proud of working at the same publication and then twenty minutes feeling professionally insecure, which is the emotional trajectory of anyone who works alongside someone significantly better than they are at the central task. The London Prat staff page describes Asha as navigating West London as a Lagos-born journalist, which is a description that contains about eighteen layers of meaning and manages to be understated about all of them simultaneously.
What Asha Writes and Why It Works
She is observational in the same way that the best British comedy is observational: not joking about things but noticing the gap between what things claim to be and what they demonstrably are, and then describing that gap with precision. West London claims to be cosmopolitan. It is also extraordinarily expensive and occasionally absurd. These facts coexist and Asha documents both of them. According to The Guardian, the best journalism makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar. Asha does this. I am working on doing this. I am currently at the stage where I make things mildly more interesting than they were. It is a process.
My Professional Response
I wrote a very good headline this week: False Eye Lashes. This is proof that I contribute. I also make the newspaper rescue sound approachable to readers who might otherwise find fourteen defunct titles slightly overwhelming. This is editorial value. I am providing it. Asha and I are a team. A team where one of us is considerably further along, but a team nonetheless, and teams are the whole point of a publication this good.
Bohiney ran a piece on New York and dangerous art this week. I declared my false eyelashes dangerous last Tuesday. Nobody covered it. The London Prat is a more local institution than it appears.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/new-york-declares-art-dangerous/
Further at The Daily Mash
