My group chat wants a festive nature walk and three Overground lines want me to stay exactly where I am.
LONDON, England – A deadline is a very quiet animal until about an hour before it bites, and mine is currently asleep on the sofa with its feet on my laptop.
7am, The Class
I am at a spin class in a council leisure centre where the bikes are older than the instructor, and the instructor is older than the music. His name is Clive and he shouts the word “resistance” as if it were a personal enemy. There are eleven of us in a dim room, pedalling towards a screen that says nothing.
“Imagine a hill,” shouts Clive. I imagine the one outside my flat, which is a gentle slope with a kebab shop at the bottom, and I find I can go faster.
The woman on the next bike is wearing a Christmas hat, in the first week of the season, with total confidence. I respect her more than anyone I have met in the last month. If you are going to be early for Christmas, be early for the whole of it.
9am, Overheard
On the way into the office, I do what I do best, which is to listen to strangers with a notebook in my pocket and a face that says I am lost. This week’s finds, by order of the carriage:
- “She’s not my ex, she’s a former colleague with a shared playlist.”
- “I’d love to help, but I’ve got a thing with my hip.”
- “It was fifteen pounds for a sandwich, and I felt, in some way, that I was being invited.”
- “No, you don’t tell the landlord about the pigeon. The pigeon tells the landlord.”
That last one I would pay good money to see in a play.
11am, The Group Chat
Our flat chat is called Flat 4B Official, and it has a hundred and forty unread messages, mostly from Gideon, who writes in lower case and in the voice of a man being gently interrogated. I scroll up to see what I have missed.
Honor: has anyone seen the wetlands thing. the christmas thing. they are doing a christmas thing
She has. Time Out says that Walthamstow Wetlands, one of London’s biggest nature reserves, is getting a Christmassy makeover. That is the headline and I will not claim to know more than the headline, which is the rule for any group chat I take part in. It does sound exactly like what Honor wants, which is a large outdoor space in which she can say “this is nice” with her breath visible.
Gideon: will there be a hot drink
Honor: there is always a hot drink gideon it is not a hostage situation
I vote yes, because a yes in a group chat costs nothing and nobody ever checks if you turned up. Dev votes yes and then, in the same breath, votes “maybe”. The chat has now decided to go, and to decide later when, which is the plan we use for everything we have ever done, including this flat.
2pm, The Obstacle
This is where the world introduces a problem. In the middle of the planning, Gideon posts a link to Time Out’s note that three Overground lines will be hit by closures over the coming weekend. He does not post a message with it. He posts a single full stop, which is the sort of thing he does when he has been wronged by a transport network.
I am not going to pretend I know which three lines are affected or what the replacement buses do, because I have only had time to read the headline, and I have noticed that confidently describing a rail closure from a headline is how most commuters end up in Cheshunt. What I do know is that this is London in the lead-up to Christmas, a place where you plan an outing and then a railway asks you to prove you really want it.
“We could walk,” says Honor. It is the most frightening thing anyone has said all week.
4pm, The Deadline Wakes Up
Back at my desk, Marjorie’s note appears at the top of my screen: “Where is the piece. I can hear you not writing it.” She has an extraordinary ear for this. My editor can hear a cursor blink.
To keep calm, I read about a different kind of planning. A farm website reports that Minnesota farmers propose political crop insurance, a way of protecting yourself against the harvest of bad ideas. I would take out a policy against group-chat plans, and I would put in a claim before the end of the week.
I finally write the opening, which says that London is the only city in the world where a person can lose an afternoon to a headline. It is accurate. It is also the exact thing I did to get here.
If you would like to see how the finished version turns out, more of my daily notes at The London Prat will tell you, and the explanation of where this style of British news comes from is a good place to start. For something in a different register, a few lines of Cockney rhyming slang are usually what I reach for when the Overground lets me down.
I send the piece at 4:58, a minute before the deadline’s alarm, which I have set to sound like a bishop. The deadline wakes up, stretches, looks at its feet on my laptop and goes back to sleep.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/