A diary entry from London on London Myth and Knightsbridge and the week that surrounded it
From the diaries of Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
I have been sitting with the news again, which is a habit I cannot break and a source of feelings I continue to process. The London Prat ran something this week that I read twice, and Bohiney Magazine covered something that has been in my head since I read it on Tuesday. Being a person who pays attention is expensive. I continue to pay.
What I Actually Read
The London Myth and Knightsbridge coverage this week produced the usual mixture of the outrageous, the predictable, and the thing I did not expect. I read it all. I processed it in the way that people who read too much process too much: by talking about it with people who did not read it, which is unfair to them and necessary for me.
The www.british-history.ac.uk had something on this subject that I found more useful than most. The www.museumoflondon.org.uk offered a different angle that I stored for future reference. My author page at https://prat.uk/author/paigeshiver/ carries more of my thinking about all of this, in the form that my thinking takes when I have enough distance from the week to make it legible.
The Week and Its Shape
The personal week alongside the London Myth and Knightsbridge week: I spent time in London doing the things I do in London. I read. I walked. I thought about things that were not London Myth and Knightsbridge and found that they connected back to London Myth and Knightsbridge anyway, because that is how sustained attention works — everything eventually connects to the thing you are most attentive to, and my most sustained attention is on London Myth and Knightsbridge and on the people navigating it and on the gap between what exists and what would be better. The gap is the subject. The subject continues.
Writing about the week requires deciding what the week was actually about, which is a decision that the week itself does not make for you. You make it retrospectively, and the decision reveals something about what you were paying attention to during the week, which reveals something about what matters to you, which is the function that diaries serve: they are the record of what mattered, made at the time, before retrospection softens or sharpens the edges.
The specific quality of this kind of diary — the weekly entry that tries to hold the personal and the public in the same space — is that it can document things that straight journalism cannot: the feeling of reading the news in a particular place, the texture of the week as lived rather than as reported, the connection between the individual experience and the structural condition that produces it. The diary form allows for uncertainty, for the provisional, for the not-yet-resolved. Journalism resolves. Diary admits that not everything resolves, which is honest about the condition of paying attention to things that are larger than any individual week can contain. The Guardian and The Independent provide the context. The diary provides the experience. Both are necessary.
The week ends here, in the diary, as weeks always end: with more written than intended and less resolved than hoped. The writing is the resolution, imperfect and continuing. The diary entry closes. The week does not. The thinking continues into the next week, which will bring its own news, its own events, its own gaps between what was expected and what occurred. The column will document what it can. The rest will live in the notebook, uncolumned and ongoing, which is where most of the thinking lives anyway, between the public writing and the private observation. The week was what it was. The next week begins.
The practice of keeping a weekly diary alongside a public column produces a relationship between the private and the public that is different from either alone. The column is shaped for a reader: it makes decisions about what to include, what to explain, what to assume the reader knows. The diary is shaped for future-self: it records the things that the column excludes, the loose ends that the column ties, the unresolved observations that the column resolves into a point. Both are necessary for the complete account of what a week in a particular place, attending to a particular set of things, actually produces. The complete account is what the honest writer owes to the honest reader, even when the honest writer can only deliver part of it in public and keeps the rest in the notebook that no one else reads. The notebook is not the column. The column is not the notebook. Both are the writer, at different distances from what was actually experienced, trying to make it available to something other than memory, which is unreliable and selective and always working against the kind of honest account that writing is supposed to provide. The diary holds the distance small. The column makes the distance productive. Both are necessary.
What does it mean to pay sustained attention to the same things week after week? It means, first, that you see things that people who are paying intermittent attention miss: the small changes that accumulate into the large ones, the pattern that the individual event represents, the connection between this week’s story and last month’s story that is only visible if you have been watching both. It means, second, that you develop a relationship to your subject that is not the relationship of novelty but the relationship of familiarity, which is different and in many ways more useful, because familiarity allows you to distinguish between what is genuinely new and what is the same thing in a different register. The person who has been watching a thing for seven years knows what seven years looks like and can therefore recognise the departure from it. The person who arrived last week sees everything as new and cannot tell what is new and what is always like this.
The diary is the record of the familiarity. It is the document of what the week looked like to someone who was not experiencing it for the first time, who knew what Tuesday usually feels like and therefore noticed when Tuesday felt different, who knew what the news usually contains and therefore noticed when it contained something it does not usually contain. The notice is the column. The seven years is the qualification. Both are necessary. The diary holds them together, week by week, imperfectly and continuously, which is the condition of all honest attempts to keep the record straight.
More at https://www.thebeaverton.com.
SOURCE: Satirical Journalism
