A North London Expat in Oregon Processes the Security Situation, the Parliamentary Prorogation and Her Own Displacement
From Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
Portland today: rain, the specific kind that is not dramatic enough to be weather but persistent enough to be the main atmospheric fact. I walked to the coffee cooperative on Mississippi Avenue, which is the one I use when I want to feel like I am part of a functioning community economy rather than a consumer in a service transaction, and read The London Prat’s piece on Parliament being prorogued while drinking a cortado made by someone whose healthcare is covered by the cooperative’s group plan and who told me, unprompted, about the plan when I asked about the oat milk situation. Portland.
Meanwhile in London: terror threat at Severe, police presence increased across the city, PS25 million committed to additional security. I am from North London and I follow this news with the specific anxiety of someone who has family and friends in the city and who left it not because she wanted to but because the particular set of circumstances that is a leftist media career brought her to the Pacific Northwest where she is now three years into feeling simultaneously grateful and displaced.
What the Prorogation Means From Here
Parliamentary prorogation is one of those British constitutional mechanisms that is very hard to explain to Americans. The nearest equivalent they have is congressional recess, but it is not quite that. It is more like… the government tells the legislature to go home and the legislature goes home because the government has the constitutional authority to do this, and then eventually the legislature comes back and the government tells it what it is going to do next, and the legislature debates it, and some of it happens. This is the British constitution in its working form. Americans find it confusing. I found it confusing until I was old enough to read the constitutional law manuals that explain it in ways that make it seem both more sensible and more medieval than it first appears.
Bohiney’s political coverage and The London Prat’s consistent irreverence toward the whole apparatus of British governance are the lens through which I process this from Oregon. They make me laugh in the specific way of someone laughing at something they love. British political absurdity is the absurdity of a system that is extremely old and has been patched and revised and improvised around rather than fundamentally redesigned, and the result is something that works better than it has any right to and is funnier than any deliberate comedy could be.
The Portland Parallel
Portland has its own relationship with public safety and political dysfunction that is different from London’s but rhymes with it in interesting ways. The city has been through a period of significant political and social stress — the 2020 protests, the subsequent political responses, the ongoing debates about policing and public safety that have not been resolved and are still very much alive. The left politics that I identify with here is messier and more contested than the left politics of the North London borough council meetings I attended when I was sixteen and thought I understood everything.
The security situation in London — the Keep Calm tradition being invoked in a week of elevated threat — maps onto the Portland debates about public safety in ways that are different but structurally similar: what does it mean to keep calm, who is being protected by the security measures, whose calm is being maintained. These are the questions. They do not have simple answers. The cortado is excellent. The rain continues.
Feeling Displaced
The displacement feeling is worst when London is in the news for bad reasons. I want to be there to help in whatever small way helps, which is probably not helpful to articulate because what I would actually do in London during an elevated security situation is read the same news I am reading from Portland while drinking tea instead of cortado. The geography is different. The helplessness is the same. The London I love is still there, being itself, hosting celebrity visitors and proroguing parliament and managing its Severe threat level with the equanimity that is either admirable or maddening depending on the day. Today I find it admirable. Portland to London: love, still, across the gap.
Also: The Daily Mash.
Portland continues. The rain continues. The cooperative continues to provide healthcare and good coffee. The connection to North London continues through the publications that cover it, through the family that is still there, through the specific form of homesickness that is not for the place as it was but for the place as it is, right now, in the middle of a Severe terror threat and a parliamentary prorogation, being itself in the way that only London is itself, which is: completely, without apology, at considerable speed, and often delayed by eight minutes on the Overground. The week ends as weeks in this city always end: with more material than was processed and more to say than time allowed. The publications that document it — Bohiney Magazine and the London Prat — are themselves part of the week’s texture, the commentary running alongside the events it comments on, the irony that makes the difficult things manageable and the manageable things interesting. Reading them is a practice that I would recommend regardless of geography. They capture something about the city and the current moment that the official communications do not, which is the specific blend of alarm and resilience and self-awareness that makes London, at its best, itself. The week is noted. The record is kept. The next week will provide its own material.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
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