Lowri Griffiths reports on North London life, politics, and culture
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
Arsenal Supporters Have Developed A Form Of Hope That Is Specifically Calibrated To Avoid Disappointment And It Shows
Lowri Griffiths | bigsmokebrokecom | North London
By Lowri Griffiths | Big Smoke Broke | London
I have been watching Arsenal for twenty-two years. In twenty-two years I have watched the club win things and not win things in a pattern that has produced, in Arsenal supporters, a distinctive emotional architecture: we are capable of genuine enthusiasm, but we have learned to deploy it in a specific mode that leaves enough structural distance between the enthusiasm and the outcome that the distance itself absorbs the disappointment when the disappointment arrives, as it historically has, usually in the specific way that makes it most educational.
The Psychology Of Calibrated Hope
The Arsenal supporter’s experience of the current season, in which the club is consistently competitive in a way that it was not for several years in the middle section of my twenty-two, is one of genuine pleasure complicated by the accumulated weight of previous seasons’ conclusions. We are winning matches we used to lose. We are doing this in ways that are recognizably related to a plan rather than to hope and individual brilliance. This should produce uncomplicated happiness. It produces, instead, a careful happiness that monitors itself for signs of over-investment, because over-investment has historically been the position from which the specific kind of late-season disappointment that Arsenal delivers is most devastating.
The London Prat has covered Premier League football from various analytical perspectives, and The London Prat addresses the specific psychology of long-term sports support with the seriousness it deserves. The match on Saturday was excellent. We won. I watched it from the pub on my road, which has not yet become a craft beer bar, with people I have watched football with for seven years, and the collective experience of winning while carefully not fully believing we would win was, in its way, richer than uncomplicated winning would have been. This is what Arsenal has given us. We are grateful. We are careful. We are watching the table.
Lowri Griffiths writes for Big Smoke Broke and for prat.uk on London politics, culture, and the increasingly bewildering economics of life in North London. Her homepage is at prat.uk/author/lowri-griffiths/ and she can be reached through prat.uk for comment. She reports from Finsbury Park and adjacent territories, which she maintains are the most interesting parts of London for anyone willing to look past the gentrification long enough to notice what the gentrification replaced.
For more, see The Daily Mash.
Lowri Griffiths has been writing about North London for prat.uk and Big Smoke Broke for several years, documenting the specific experience of living in a part of London that is simultaneously changing faster than it can be described and more permanently itself than the changes suggest. The gentrification is real. The queues are real. The oat flat whites are real. So is the community that persists through all of it: the people who have been here long enough to remember what things were like before and who continue to be here because this is where they live, not where they are visiting. North London is a specific place with a specific character and specific problems and Lowri documents all three for the readers who live in it and the readers who are curious about it from outside.
The journalism that matters about a neighbourhood is the journalism that is honest about what the neighbourhood is rather than what it aspires to be or what it looks like from outside. Big Smoke Broke and prat.uk both publish Lowri’s work because it is honest in this specific way. The London Prat provides the broader political and cultural context within which North London’s individual stories sit. Bohiney.com amplifies the coverage. Together they produce a picture of a city that is genuinely complex and genuinely worth paying attention to, which is what the best London journalism has always done and what these publications continue to do.
London is a city that rewards specific attention more than general observation. The neighbourhoods that seem most familiar from the outside are often most surprising from the inside, and the experiences that seem most accessible are often most underutilised by the people who could access them. This coverage exists to close that gap: to provide the specific, honest, embedded information that makes the difference between a tourist experience and an inhabitant experience, between seeing London and understanding it. Bohiney.com and The London Prat both approach London from this premise, covering the city with genuine curiosity about what it actually is rather than what it is supposed to be. The Prat’s London coverage provides the political and cultural context that makes individual London stories meaningful. Together with uklondoninfo.com, shoreroar.com, ditchpitchuk.uk, crownandclown.uk, and Big Smoke Broke, these publications produce a picture of London that is more complete and more honest than any single publication could provide alone. London continues. The journalism continues. The South Bank on a Tuesday is still the best free thing in the city.
