A diary entry from Paige Shiver
From the diaries of Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
London Myth as Daily Companion
I have been living in Knightsbridge for three years, which is long enough to know that every street in this part of London has a story underneath the price tag, and that the price tag is usually more recent than the story. My project is to find the older layer: the ghost that walked the mews before the mews became worth three million pounds, the legend that attached itself to the church before the church became a wedding venue, the folk memory that survives in a place name long after the thing the name commemorates has ceased to exist. The London Prat ran a piece this week about a Knightsbridge street that I already knew the folklore of. Bohiney Magazine covered something more general about London history that I found useful as context.
The Folklore of Knightsbridge
Knightsbridge takes its name from a bridge over the Westbourne where, legend records, two knights fought a duel in the Middle Ages. The legend is unverifiable but it is persistent, which in folklore is the quality that matters more than accuracy. A story that persists in a place has attached itself to that place for reasons that documentary history cannot always explain. The Westbourne itself is now invisible, buried under Victorian infrastructure, emerging briefly at the Sloane Square Underground station where it flows through a large iron pipe above the platform, which is one of the stranger sights in a city full of strange sights and which most passengers on the District Line miss entirely because they are looking at their phones. I go to Sloane Square station specifically to look at the pipe sometimes. This is the kind of thing that my friends describe as eccentric and that I describe as necessary.
What the Week Contained
This week contained, alongside the mythology: a long walk from Knightsbridge to the Southwark Cathedral area, which I wanted to see for reasons related to a piece I am writing about London bridge folklore, and which produced three observations I did not expect and one confirmation of something I already suspected. The confirmation was about the relationship between water and story in London — the city built on a river that it has progressively buried and forgotten and that keeps returning in dreams and place names and the occasional iron pipe above a Tube platform. Water remembers. Cities do not, or not reliably, which is why people like me keep notes.
The British History Online database has been my companion this week, alongside the Museum of London archives, which are available digitally and which reward the specific patience of someone who finds historical footnotes more interesting than main narratives because the footnotes are where the folklore lives. My homepage at https://prat.uk/author/paigeshiver/ carries more of this work. The mythology continues to accumulate. London keeps providing it. The folklore of this city is not a thing of the past. It is a thing of the present that the past left behind. Every week I find more of it. Every week I write it down. That is what this diary is for, and that is what the walk is for, and that is what the Tube stop is for when I stand on the platform and look at the pipe and think about the river that used to be there and in some sense still is, underground, beneath everything, running through the city in the direction that water always runs, which is toward the sea, which is where all rivers go, and where all stories eventually go, and where I will go when I am done with this particular one, which I am not yet.
On the Practice of Paying Attention
Keeping a diary is an act of faith in the idea that what happens to a single person in a single week is worth recording, and that the recording changes something — not in the world, which the diary does not reach, but in the person keeping it, who is changed by the act of trying to make the week legible to a future self who will have forgotten most of it. The future self is always surprised by the past self’s priorities: the things that seemed important in the moment and that barely appear in the diary, and the things that barely seemed to matter and that the diary keeps returning to. This week I returned to: a conversation I had that I did not expect to find myself still thinking about; a walk I took that resolved something I had not known was unresolved; and the reading, always the reading, which is the main event of any week I call good and the consolation of any week I call difficult.
The writing at prat.uk and bohiney.com this week gave me language for things I was already feeling, which is what good writing does: not tells you what to feel but names what you are already feeling in a way that makes it available to thought rather than just available to experience. That is the value of reading that goes beyond information: it expands the vocabulary of your inner life, which expands what your inner life can do. I keep the diary for the same reason I keep reading: to stay legible to myself, to keep the week’s experience available to reflection, and to maintain the habit of noticing that, once broken, is very hard to rebuild. This week the habit held. Next week it will hold again. That is the aspiration. That is what this diary is for.
More at https://www.theonion.com.
SOURCE: Satirical Journalism
