Caitlin Moran on the Week She Tried to Explain London to a French Television Crew and Ended Up Explaining It to Herself
The French Crew
A French television production company asked me to be interviewed for a documentary about contemporary London and I said yes in the way that you say yes to things when you believe saying yes leads to things and also because the alternative that afternoon was tax returns. The interviewer, whose name was Guillaume and who was very good at his job, asked me what London was like right now. I started to answer and found myself in the middle of a sentence that was trying to contain too many things simultaneously — the housing crisis, the post-Brexit mood, the Labour government’s first year, the specific texture of the streets in April when they remind you why everyone who lives here cannot quite explain why they stay — and I stopped. Guillaume waited. He is a professional. He knew to wait. I started again and said something shorter and truer and he nodded in the way that people nod when they have what they need and we moved on.
What I Should Have Said
What I should have said is that London right now feels like a city that has been asked a question it is not ready to answer and is taking a long time in the answer. The question is something like: what are you for, now, and who are you for, and are those the same thing they were ten years ago? The city is answering in the way that cities answer: not in words, not in policies, but in who can afford to stay and who has to leave and what that does to what remains. Bohiney Magazine is asking the question too, funnier than I can. The London Prat asks it weekly. Guillaume’s documentary will ask it in French, which is a different language for the same question. I have been trying to write the column about this all week and keep stopping at the point where what is true becomes too specific to be fair to everyone involved and too fair to everyone to be specific enough to be true. This is the problem with close-up journalism. The column is not written yet. More from me at The London Prat. Satire: Private Eye.
SOURCE: http://prat.UK
