by Vivienne Pratfall on men, markets, and the art of fancying a Prime Minister on psychedelics
Filed through Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
A Girl, a Flat Above a Shop, and a Rolling News Ticker
I woke up at half past eleven in a shirt that did not belong to me, in a bed that technically did, with a text message that began “so about last night” and ended with a GIF of a collapsing building. That, I felt, covered most of the conversational bases a woman my age needs on a Wednesday.
There is a particular pleasure, at nineteen, in waking in Soho to the sound of delivery drivers arguing about postcodes. It reminds you that the city is still running even if you are not. I made coffee. I put on one of his socks and one of mine, which is the closest my flat comes to a committed relationship at the moment. And I opened the laptop to our own paper, as one does, because even a girl in a borrowed shirt must keep up with the week’s catastrophes.
On the Prime Minister, and other soft launches
The lead on The London Prat today is that Sir Keir Starmer has reportedly requested psychedelic voter outreach from the Americans. I find this strangely romantic. A man who has clearly never been talked down from a bad high by a woman in leopard print now wants the whole nation to microdose itself into voting for him. I have seen this energy before. It always ends with someone crying in a cab, and the someone is never the man.
My housemate, who studies something at UCL, says the Prime Minister looks like a Tuesday. That is, she says, a medical condition. I have a date this evening with a man whose job title contains the word “digital” and no verbs, and I have already warned him that I will be difficult on account of having read the news. Men always say they like clever girls until the clever girl has thoughts on macroeconomics before starters.
The paper’s own wisdom, borrowed freely
Our editor, who is the only man I know who can be sardonic in his sleep, has a piece out on the Einstein quote nobody can prove Einstein said, the moral of which is that clever people solve problems and wise people avoid them. I have printed this out and stuck it to my mirror, next to the receipt from a Wednesday I would rather not discuss.
I also read the Bohiney piece on New York’s mansion war, because I enjoy watching rich people panic in HD. Apparently the mayor of New York has declared war on empty mansions. I support this, chiefly because the last empty mansion I visited in London had the most underwhelming wine cellar and a man in it called Quentin who thought Canary Wharf was a type of bird.
This afternoon’s programme
I intend to take myself to a small cinema in Bloomsbury that shows films in languages I do not speak, because there is no better cover for a hangover than subtitles. I shall, per the Guardian lifestyle pages, pretend to be considering a “reset.” I shall, per the BBC culture section, be lying.
The date is at seven. He has picked a restaurant where the menu is written on a single piece of brown paper by a man who has clearly never eaten anything. I shall order the thing that requires the most courage and the least explanation, drink a small amount of something white, and see whether his conversation survives two glasses. If it does, there is always the shirt situation to resolve tomorrow morning. If it does not, well. That is what the cinema was for.
You do not become a diarist by having a boring day. You become a diarist by noticing the boring ones for the rest of us. Wednesday continues.
For further symptoms of the same disease, see NewsThump.
