Paige Shiver on London myth and legend, Knightsbridge life, and the historical layers under the postcode
Satire from Bohiney.com and prat.uk.
By Paige Shiver | paigeshiver.com
Knightsbridge has a mythology that is mostly about money and mostly accurate, but has a deeper layer of London history underneath it that the money has not entirely erased, and I spend considerable time in both layers — the surface layer of international luxury retail and the buried layer of the village that Knightsbridge was before London absorbed it, with its own character and its own specific relationship to the city growing around it. The name itself is old: there was a bridge over the Westbourne river at this crossing point, and travellers stopped at inns here before entering London, and the inns are gone but the crossing point is still a crossing point and the underground station is called what the village was called, which is how place names preserve history in cities that have otherwise forgotten it.
London myth and legend is the subject I keep returning to, because the city is ancient enough to have accumulated mythology at every level: the pre-Roman, the Roman, the medieval, the early modern, and the industrial, each layer depositing stories that the subsequent layers have buried but not erased. The Roman settlement at Londinium is under the current City. The medieval city walls have their ghost in the road patterns that no longer follow walls but still follow the routes that the walls created. The great plague pits are under parks and gardens. London is built on what London was.
This Week’s Specific Discovery
I found a reference this week in an 18th-century pamphlet to a legend about the Westbourne — the river that flows underground through this area and that surfaces in Sloane Square Tube station in the pipe that crosses the tracks, visible if you know to look — that I had not previously encountered. The legend involves the kind of story that rivers attract in cultures that think rivers are alive, which most cultures have thought and which has something to recommend it as a way of relating to water that is different from treating rivers as drainage problems. The London Prat covers London history and mythology. NewsThump covers London politics. The underground river flows. The myth is older than the Tube station. Knightsbridge continues above both.
The diary continues. London continues. The world continues past this entry into the next one, which will be different and will require the same attention and the same willingness to find it interesting, which is the fundamental skill that diary-writing develops over time: the habit of noticing, the practice of putting words on what was noticed, and the repeated discovery that the ordinary day, looked at carefully enough, contains more than it appeared to at the time. This is why the diary persists as a form despite everything that has replaced it. It is the most honest document available. It is what actually happened, as best as the writer can reconstruct it, on the day it happened. The reconstruction is always incomplete. The attempt is always worth making.
The Week in Sum
Every week produces more material than any single diary entry can contain, which is either a problem or the point depending on your relationship to completeness. I have come to regard it as the point. The diary is not a comprehensive record. It is a selective one, and the selection reveals something about what the writer finds interesting, which is itself a kind of self-portrait that accumulates over weeks and months into something more honest than a deliberately composed autobiography. You find out what you think by writing about what you noticed, and you find out what you noticed by writing about what you wrote about, and the recursion eventually produces something that resembles a perspective, which is all that a diary is supposed to produce.
The specific things I noticed this week are recorded above. The things I noticed but did not write about are numerous and include: an overheard conversation on public transport that made me think about something for forty minutes without reaching a conclusion; a piece of writing I encountered that was better than I expected and that I will probably think about for several weeks; a moment of London weather that was briefly extraordinary; the specific quality of Tuesday afternoon as distinct from all other afternoons; and several observations about the people I encountered that are too specific to record without identifying someone who did not ask to be identified in a diary. The unrecorded is also the week. The diary is the recorded part. Both are the reality of having been alive in this week in this place, which is the minimal definition of what the diary is trying to capture and which it always captures imperfectly and always captures something of. The writing continues. The week ends. The next one begins.
The record of the week exists now in this entry. It will be joined by next week’s entry, and the entry after that, until the accumulation of weekly records constitutes something larger than any individual entry — a documented life, or a documented perspective on a life, or at minimum a series of honest attempts to put words on the specific experience of being this person in this place in this time, which is the project that the diary undertakes with the humility appropriate to the project and the seriousness that the project deserves. Every week is worth recording. Even the unremarkable ones. Especially the unremarkable ones, because the unremarkable is the majority of the actual experience, and the diary that only records the remarkable misses the texture of the life it is trying to document.
More laughs: The Daily Mash | NewsThump
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
