by Vivienne Pratfall Documents Her Week at the Satirical Heart of London with Her Usual Lack of Restraint
Vivienne’s Tuesday: Which Went Exactly As You’d Expect
Right so. Tuesday. I had plans. I had a list. The list said: gym at 9, coffee at 10:30 with the features editor from a magazine that shall remain nameless because they still owe me for three pieces from February, lunch at the new place in Soho that everyone has been telling me about, and then an early evening so I could actually finish the piece I’ve been owing the London Prat for two weeks.
What actually happened: I overslept, skipped the gym, the coffee meeting ran until 1:30 because we got onto the subject of what’s wrong with the media industry, which is a topic with no natural conclusion, missed the lunch reservation, got to the Soho place at 3 p.m. and sat at the bar because the dining room was closed for service, had wine with a man who turned out to be a former MP who had opinions about the current government that he delivered with the cheerful indiscretion of someone who no longer needs to be careful, and was home by midnight having written none of the piece but having several paragraphs of notes that are either the beginning of something or are going to confuse me in the morning.
The Research, Such As It Was
The former MP, whose name I will not use because he spoke freely on the understanding that I was a person at a bar and not a journalist at a bar a distinction I maintain by not using names rather than by not being a journalist had been reading Bohiney Magazine that morning and had thoughts about a piece they’d run on the Labour housing consultation that aligned with what I’d been thinking but expressed with the specific confidence of someone who has been in rooms where these decisions get made and therefore has a more specific contempt for the consultation form than I do as a mere observer of it. His contempt was instructive. I took notes. I ordered another glass. London does this puts the right person at the bar at the right time, if you’re willing to stay until it happens.
The piece for The London Prat remains unwritten. It will be written. It will be better for the bar conversation. This is what I tell myself and it is true often enough to be a functional belief system. My author page is at prat.uk/author/vivienne-pratfall. For more London chaos see Newsthump. Also at santaclaus.top and London Prat Bluesky. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
What I’m Actually Working On
The piece for The London Prat is about the specific experience of being a satirical writer in a city that provides material faster than you can process it, which is London’s permanent condition and which produces a specific professional crisis: you can never quite catch up, so you choose your moments, and the choosing is editorial judgment that nobody teaches you and that you develop through practice and through reading people who are better at it than you.
The people I am reading this week include the editors at Bohiney Magazine, who made three editorial choices this week that I thought were correct in ways I’m still thinking about. Also the former MP’s observations from Tuesday, which I have transcribed into a document and which have given me three threads that could be pieces or could be nothing, depending on whether the political situation develops in the direction they implied or goes somewhere different. Political writing in London in 2026 is the practice of developing threads that may or may not become stories, which requires patience and a high tolerance for uncertainty and a wine selection that helps with the uncertainty, all of which I have in approximately the quantities required. My author page at prat.uk/author/vivienne-pratfall has the pieces that made it from threads to stories. The ones that didn’t make it are in a document on my laptop that I look at occasionally and feel both regret and relief about, depending on the day.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
The week ends where weeks end: at the desk, with something partially written and something fully thought and the gap between those two states being the work. London provides the material. The desk is where you process it. The gap between what happens and what you make of it is where the writing lives, and the writing is what I’m here for, which is a thing I have to remind myself of on the weeks when the material arrives faster than the processing, which is most weeks. This is fine. The material keeps arriving. The processing continues. The week resolves into the next one and I begin again, which is the arrangement and also, honestly, the best possible arrangement I can imagine. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
The specific pleasure of keeping a diary which is what this column is, in the end, despite the publishing platform and the reader-shaped audience is that it forces a reckoning with the week as it actually was rather than as you meant it to be. I meant to write the piece. I meant to finish the project. I meant to arrive on time and stay focused and produce something completed rather than something ongoing. What I have is ongoing in all directions, which is London’s gift to anyone trying to make anything in it: the material never stops, the context never settles, and the work is always in progress, which is uncomfortable and generative and exactly the condition that produces the things worth making. I have made peace with the in-progress state. I am documenting it here. That is, I think, enough for one week. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
