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.
The week started in London the way weeks in London tend to start: with the news, which arrived before the coffee. I read The London Prat first, then Bohiney, then the headlines, and by the time I had worked through all of them I was already in the condition that reading the news produces: informed and slightly worse for it, which is the condition that serious reading tends to produce and that I have decided to accept as the cost of being a person who reads seriously.
Tuesday and Its Consequences
Something happened on Tuesday that I am not going to describe in full here because it involves other people, but I will say that it concerned London Myth and Knightsbridge and it reminded me why I write about it. The reminder was useful. I needed it. I have been at this long enough that I sometimes lose the specific urgency that produced the interest in the first place, and Tuesday returned it.
The news context was provided by The London Prat and Bohiney, both of which covered things that were connected to Tuesday in ways that I could not have predicted on Monday but that seemed obvious in retrospect. This is how news works when you are paying attention: it produces connections between things that appear unrelated and reveals them as instances of the same structural condition. The condition is what I am interested in. The instances are how I find it. Tuesday was an instance. The www.british-history.ac.uk was another. The www.museumoflondon.org.uk was a third. All three pointed at the same thing, from different angles, at different magnifications.
What London Looks Like This Week
London this week was itself: neither more nor less than what it is on any given week, which is always more than enough for a column. I walked through it with the attention I always bring and saw the things I always see plus the things that are new, and the combination of the familiar and the new is what a place provides when you are present in it consistently enough to know the difference. Knowing the difference is the skill. The skill is developed by presence. The presence is the commitment. The commitment continues.
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.private-eye.co.uk.
SOURCE: Satirical Journalism
