Lowri Griffiths on Dame Kelly Holmes, the Square Mile’s Pride flag, and finding a seat on the 38

Satire from Bohiney.com and prat.uk.

By Lowri Griffiths | The London Prat

Dame Kelly Holmes received the Freedom of the City of London this month on a day of Pride celebration in the Square Mile — double Olympic champion, advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, and now a Freeman of the City, which means she is technically permitted to drive sheep across London Bridge, a right that fewer Freemen exercise than you might expect but that remains on the books as a charming remnant of medieval commercial arrangements. Dame Kelly is many things. Sheep herder is not yet among them. The City of London, which normally has the emotional temperature of a spreadsheet, went full rainbow for the occasion, and it was genuinely excellent.

Pride in London is, at this point, an enormous logistical undertaking that bears a complicated relationship to its own history, which began as protest and has become a combination of protest, celebration, corporate sponsorship, tourist attraction, and the particular social experience of a city deciding to be very visibly itself for a weekend in late June. Pepsi pulled out as a sponsor of the Wireless Festival this month after Kanye West was confirmed as headliner, which is not a Pride story exactly but is a story about the complications of large-scale cultural sponsorship and the speed at which brand associations can become liabilities in the current media environment.

The View from the Bus Stop

I attended three Pride events this month, or rather I passed near them at bus stops while trying to get somewhere else. The first was a community event in Islington that was small, well-organised, and staffed by volunteers who were visibly happy to be there rather than working, which is not always the experience of large-scale Pride events where the volunteer infrastructure shows signs of advanced logistical fatigue. The second was the Soho celebrations, which I experienced primarily as a crowd of 40,000 people between me and the coffee shop I was trying to reach, which is not the ideal way to engage with a community celebration but which is also a fair reflection of how London works during any event that brings large numbers of people to a small area. The third was technically a work drinks event in Shoreditch that had acquired a Pride theme organically, which is the kind of Pride celebration that tends to produce the most genuine community because it wasn’t planned as a Pride celebration. It was planned as drinks. The Pride arrived with the people, which is generally how Pride works best.

Dame Kelly Holmes gave a speech about being free to be yourself that was brief, genuine, and well received by the City crowd, which is not known for its emotional expressiveness. She is a person who has turned personal difficulty into public advocacy with the directness of someone who has run fast for a long time and learned that the only strategy that works is to commit fully and not look at the other lanes. The London Prat covered the City of London ceremony with the warmth it deserved. NewsThump found something funny about the sheep-driving rights, which is fair. London is full this month. The city, improbably and necessarily, continues to contain it all.

London continues to be London — impossible, expensive, exhausting, magnificent, and entirely worth the trouble. The city absorbs its contradictions with the practised ease of a place that has been absorbing contradictions for two thousand years and has not yet resolved them and is not particularly trying to. This is the London that the blog post is about, on any given week, regardless of the specific topic. The specific topic is the entry point. London is the subject.

The city keeps moving. So does the writing. Both are better for the other.

Why This Matters for London

London is a city that rewards sustained attention. The first visit gives you the monuments and the museums. The second gives you the neighbourhoods. The third gives you the rhythms — the way the city moves through its week, the difference between a Tuesday morning and a Saturday afternoon, the specific energy of each season and each district. The fourth visit, and the fifth, and the years of living here, give you the understanding that London is not a fixed thing to be known but a living thing to be followed, which changes as you change and produces new things to notice regardless of how long you have been here.

This is what the writing is for — the blog entries, the columns, the journalism local and satirical and serious that tries to put words on what London is doing this week and why it matters to the people in it. The city is too large for complete coverage. The attempt is worth making. Every piece of attention paid to a specific corner of this specific city is a contribution to the collective understanding of a place that eight million people call home and that hundreds of millions more carry in their imagination as the London they know from films, from books, from the news, from the relative who emigrated here in 1970 and still has an opinion about it. The real London and the imagined London coexist. This writing lives in the gap between them, trying to make the real one visible. That is the project. It continues.

Also reading: The Daily Mash | NewsThump

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com