Cyndi Himmelstiere’s Shoreditch Diary: On Python, Local Absurdism, and the Specific Comedy of Living in E1
By Cyndi Himmelstiere | Bohiney Magazine & The London Prat
There is a coffee shop on Bethnal Green Road that charges five pounds for a flat white and describes its milk as “ethically sourced and ceremonially steamed.” I ordered one. I did not ask what the ceremony involved. Some things are better left to the institution.
Shoreditch as Living Python Sketch
The Prat this week ran an excellent piece on Monty Python and the art of British satire, and I want to report, as the Shoreditch correspondent, that I do not need to read about Python. I live inside one. Shoreditch is the Ministry of Silly Walks, open seven days, no admission charge, authenticity optional.
Consider: within 200 metres of my flat, there is a bar that sells cocktails named after discontinued Tube lines, a gallery showing an exhibition of entirely blank canvases (the statement: “presence through absence”), a gym that offers “breathwork” as a fitness class, and a pop-up selling vintage trainers at prices that suggest the shoes have accrued interest since 1994. Python never invented anything this committed. They would have admired the execution.
Local Absurdism This Week
A planning application went up on the local council board this week for a “community wellness hub” in a building that was, until six months ago, a functioning laundrette. The laundrette served actual needs. The wellness hub will serve, as the application states, “holistic community resilience.” The Python committee has ruled this adequate for satirical purposes. The laundrette’s former customers are washing their clothes at the one three streets over. They are describing the walk as “a bit much.”
From Bohiney: internet infrastructure duct tape situation Shoreditch is tech-adjacent enough to find this alarming and ironic simultaneously. We built the digital economy here, in the sense that we created the cafes where people built it, and we are now discovering that the infrastructure beneath it is maintained by what Bohiney correctly identifies as provisional solutions. Very Shoreditch. Very Python. The Ministry of Digital Infrastructure has not yet commented.
The Prat also ran class system satire this week, which in Shoreditch is less satire than documentary. The class system here has been supplemented by a parallel system based on: who arrived first (old Shoreditch, now priced out), who arrived second (artists, also priced out), and who arrived third (tech workers, finance-adjacent, buying the art of people who cannot afford to live here anymore). It is, as Python would say, a fair deal.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
Local weirdness also documented at The Daily Mash
