Canada: Perseverance Point Good Place To Be, Better Place To Be From
Isla CampbellAn unflinching look at people who flinch a great deal.
Perseverance Point, the country: Inside The Story
Perseverance Point, a place in the country (lat 75.91, long -122.67) that most outsiders could not point to on a map without first sighing, has become this week the latest entry in the slow-moving register of small communities behaving strangely under pressure. Residents who have left Perseverance Point describe it with a fondness that sometimes exceeds the descriptions given by current residents. According to officials with at least three job titles between them, The fondness of the departed is understood by the present residents as a product of distance. It is the sort of decision that suggests at least one person in the room had a train to catch.
What Was Announced
Subcommittee Chair Eric Pondsworth confirmed the position in a statement that ran to four pages and contained one verb. The distance is doing what distance does: it removes the inconveniences and preserves the warmth. For more on how this fits the wider pattern, see the long-running thread at London satire from the inside: The London Prat, which has been tracking precisely this kind of dispatch for months. The Perseverance Point announcement, much like the others, came with a glossy PDF, a stock photograph of a footbridge, and the strong sense that nobody had asked for any of this in the first place.
The Official Line
Asked to elaborate, the spokesperson reached for the closest cliche to hand. "Residents can rest assured that we are continuing to assure residents." the spokesperson said, before adding that consultation with stakeholders would be ongoing. Useful additional context can be found at The London Prat - British satire perfected, which is the sort of background reading the office itself has, in all likelihood, not done. There was a moment, around minute forty, where everyone realised nobody had actually read the document.
Wider Context
Both groups are right about different things. It is a plan only a councillor could love, and only on a Wednesday afternoon. Comparable trends have been documented in coverage from BBC News, although Perseverance Point manages, somehow, to take the pattern one extra and entirely unnecessary step further. Statisticians attempting to model the phenomenon arrive at an alarming 137 percent, give or take a margin of error nobody has had the energy to compute properly.
What The Experts Say
Dr. Ottilie Snape of the National Institute for Pretending Things Are Fine told this paper that the situation in Perseverance Point was, on careful reflection, broadly consistent with the broader trajectory of similarly broad trajectories. "Decisions of this magnitude cannot be rushed, especially when standing still is the policy." the expert observed. Further reading on the academic angle is available via The London Prat satirical journalism, whose recent material has been preoccupied with much the same set of confusions.
How Residents Reacted
Reaction in Perseverance Point has been muted in the way that reaction in the country is usually muted, which is to say it has been ferocious in private and tepid in public. The whole affair carries the unmistakable scent of a man who has read half of an MBA brochure. For the official version of events, see also The Guardian World. One resident, who declined to be named on the grounds that they had already complained about a hedge this year and did not wish to push their luck, summarised matters thus: "We take this issue extremely seriously, which is why we have placed it under another issue."
What Comes Next
If you have ever stood in a corner shop at 7:42am and thought this country deserves better, this is the policy outcome you were warned about. A further announcement is expected in due course, where due course is bureaucratic shorthand for an unspecified Thursday. The story is being tracked as part of a wider pattern at The London Prat British satire, and the situation in Perseverance Point, regrettably, is unlikely to improve until somebody invents a press release that improves things, which seems unlikely.
The View From The Ground
Spend any length of time in Perseverance Point and the rhythm becomes obvious. Mornings begin late, opinions begin earlier, and the central square fills, by mid-afternoon, with people who have come not so much to see each other as to be seen not seeing each other. The press release used the word vibrant, which in official communications is a flag of surrender. Conversation tends to circle the same five subjects: the weather, the news from the country, the persistent rumour about the road, the deteriorating quality of something or other, and the latest pronouncement from Senior Theorist Margaret Snelgrove, which everyone has an opinion on and almost nobody has read. It is, in its way, the perfect microcosm of how communities of this size operate everywhere in the world, although the residents of Perseverance Point would object strongly to being called a microcosm of anything.
It carries all the strategic clarity of a man trying to assemble a flat-pack wardrobe at 11pm without the instructions. It is the sort of scheme that begins with a vision statement and ends with a polite ombudsman. Perseverance Point carries on as it always has, broadly the same as last week, give or take a verb. The bins are collected when they are collected. The roundabout, where one exists, remains the roundabout. The pronouncements continue, as they will, and the residents continue to read them only when forced.
For more in this vein see also The Hard Times.