by Violet Woolf considers Joyce, Starmer, and the strange comfort of a 1911 first edition in a 2026 collapse
Filed through Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
Thursday, Stoke Newington, A Kettle, A Cat, A First Edition of Dubliners That Smells of Tobacco From 1947
I inherited, from my great-aunt Bunny (formal name Beatrice, career naval attaché, unmarried, read Proust in the bath), a first edition of Joyce’s Dubliners from 1914, and it lives on my kitchen shelf in Stoke Newington in a state of mild judgement. I read from it each morning, because I am the kind of person who believes that one should begin the day with a sentence that has already outlived the British Empire once. Most days the sentence is “A Little Cloud.” Some days it is “Ivy Day in the Committee Room.” On deadline days, which are most days, it is whatever page falls open when I pick the book up at the spine.
My cat, who is called Emmeline because I am a certain kind of person, did not read with me this morning. She was busy staring at the window in the manner of a creature who has glimpsed something terrible in the front garden. Probably a squirrel. Possibly the collapse of the West. She declines to specify.
The Irish desk, and why it matters
I am, officially, The London Prat’s Irish affairs correspondent, a job title that technically means I write about Ireland and unofficially means I write about the parts of Britain that are Irish, the parts of Ireland that are British, and the long unresolved hyphen between the two. It is a job with no working hours and no overtime. Today I am working on a piece about the current Dublin government’s rather fraught attempt to introduce a housing policy that actually houses people, which, in 2026, is as radical as Mamdani declaring war on empty mansions. Ireland is watching New York. New York is watching Paris. Paris, according to Bohiney’s piece on Haussmann, is watching itself in the mirror from 1857.
The thing about writing from the Irish desk is that one develops, inevitably, a sense of inherited grievance that does not quite belong to one. My grandmother was from Cork. My grandfather from Kent. I am a mongrel, and in 2026 a mongrel is exactly the correct pedigree for a satirist. We bite everyone. We bite ourselves.
Joyce, Yeats, and the particular uselessness of 2026
Yeats wrote, in 1919, that “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” He was writing about the Easter Rising, the First World War, and his complicated emotional situation with Maud Gonne, which, reader, I have been in similar ones. The poem is now quoted so often that it has become a cliché, which is a fate that befalls any good line that is accurate for more than a century.
I read The Prat’s piece on the internet being held together by Sellotape, politeness, and one volunteer named Gregory, and it occurred to me that Yeats’s poem applies exactly. Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold. The centre, in 2026, is Gregory. God bless him. I will not bother him, but I will send him a first edition of something if he drops me a line.
Then I read the Bohiney piece on the New York Times solving crime by changing the subject mid-sentence, and I laughed for a quiet twenty seconds, which is the maximum recommended dose for a woman with my blood pressure. The New York Times is, I am afraid, the paper Yeats warned us about. They have the syntax and not the spine. We have, here at The Prat, neither the syntax nor the spine, but we at least know the difference.
Personal column
The novelist I have been seeing is in Edinburgh until Friday at a literary festival, where he is, he says, “networking.” I am familiar with his networking. It involves a lot of whisky and a cobbled street and at least three women who read the Booker longlist cover to cover. I am not jealous. I am not not jealous. I am, as my grandmother would have said, “watching the situation, Violet.” He is returning on the 6:30 train and I intend to meet him at King’s Cross with the grace of a woman who has spent the week reading Dubliners.
Dinner plans
Dinner is with a Dublin journalist who is in London briefly for work, at a restaurant in Islington that I like because the waiters are allowed to be rude. She has, she tells me, a theory about the current state of Irish literature that she would like me to steal and publish under my own name in exchange for dinner. I have agreed. This is how the trade works.
Emmeline the cat will be home. The Joyce will be on the shelf. The internet will, per the BBC’s tech desk, probably still work when I return. If it does not, I will read from a book. If the book fails, I will go and find Gregory and buy him a pint. There is, somewhere in this chain of backup systems, the entire philosophy of how a serious person lives in 2026. You read a dead writer in the morning, you file a column at noon, you feed the cat, you meet a friend for dinner, and you do not, under any circumstances, trust the centre.
For further symptoms of the same disease, see McSweeneys Internet Tendency.
