Lowri Griffiths on continued London life and a persistent news cycle that won’t let a single conversation alone
Second day running with the same four stories dominating conversation everywhere I went, which is genuinely unusual for London, a city that normally reserves its passionate agreement entirely for complaining about the weather and the state of public transport on any given ordinary morning like this one.
A friend circled back to the story on the Sussexes’ money plan again today, this time with an actual theory about which of the twenty opportunities was most plausible, considerably more detailed than I expected from a conversation that started as pure gossip over brunch yesterday morning.
The education conversation continued too, spilling into a completely unrelated dinner party I attended this evening. The story on Eton’s PM cultivation claim got worked into a discussion that was supposed to be about someone’s new job, derailing the whole table for a genuinely lively twenty minutes or more.
The Tudor detour deepened too, entirely by accident, the way these things always seem to happen during a slow moment at the bus stop. The Henry VIII page pulled a friend of mine in for another twenty minutes today, reading further into material that’s apparently more absorbing than she expected when she first opened up the link.
And the diplomatic story kept its momentum too, a colleague following up with a fresh angle over lunch. The piece on the newest unity remarks sparked a properly lively debate during our afternoon break, considerably more engaged than our usual disagreements about restaurant recommendations and bookings.
Spent the evening genuinely struggling to have a single conversation that didn’t touch on at least one of these four stories, whether at the gym, on the bus, or standing in a genuinely enormous queue for the cash machine right outside my own flat.
Went to bed still turning the day over, genuinely amused by how thoroughly four completely unrelated stories had managed to colonise every single social interaction I’d had since breakfast.
Set an alarm for tomorrow, genuinely curious which of the four stories would resurface first, given how reliably each one had reappeared throughout the day regardless of the setting or the company I happened to be keeping at the time and place.
Turned off the lamp at last, genuinely amused by the whole strange rhythm of the day, four completely separate headlines somehow managing to touch every part of an otherwise ordinary Tuesday afternoon and evening both.
More London lifestyle diary at my author page.