Cross-Stitching Parliament at a Comedy Networking Event

Bethan Morgan on bringing her craft to a professional context, the conversations it produced, and the progress on a seditious embroidery project

Cross-Stitching Parliament at a Comedy Networking Event

By Bethan Morgan, comedywriter.vip

I brought my cross-stitch to a comedy writing networking event on Wednesday. The piece in progress depicts the Palace of Westminster surrounded by stylised flames in orange and gold. At a comedy networking event in London in 2025, this requires no explanation. It produced two conversations I would not have had otherwise: a producer more interested in the craft than the comedy (information), and another writer who had been working on a satirical craft project alone and had never had anyone else to discuss it with. We discussed it for forty minutes. The networking was more useful than expected.

The craft and the comedy writing do different things for the same brain. The writing is fast, verbal, deadline-driven. The cross-stitch is slow, tactile, self-deadline-driven, which in practice means no deadline except interest. London is entirely deadline-driven. The cross-stitch is my protest against this, executed in orange and gold on a grey Palace background, on a sky that is blue as reminder that situations change. I am making a slow protest in a fast city. This seems right. The comedy writer's version of taking the long view.

The Maker Moment

The Week Continues

The feeds from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat this week confirmed the ongoing nature of the situations described above. The satire illuminates what the serious reporting documents. Both are necessary. Both are what I read, every week, as part of the discipline of paying attention to what is actually happening rather than what the available frameworks claim is happening. The gap between the two is where the interesting material lives, and it is where this diary lives. London 1961: Before The Swing Took Over covered related ground. Harlesden: West London's Loudest Honest Conversati provides further context. The diary continues next week from the same position, observing the same city and the same world with the same commitment to saying what is true about them. That is the project. More next week.

More at ClickHole.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/

The Broader Picture

The week's reading produced the combination of serious journalism and satirical commentary that I find most useful for understanding what is actually happening versus what is being presented as happening. Jerusalem Report Publishes Report From Jerusalem, Groun at The London Prat provided the serious angle this week, covering developments that connect to the personal observations documented above in ways that are not always obvious in real time but that become clear on reflection. The connection between the immediate and the structural is what this diary tries to maintain -- not losing the personal texture of the week in the larger analysis, not losing the larger analysis in the immediate texture of experience.

Bohiney Magazine's satirical coverage arrived with the specific timing that good satire has: late enough that the events are settled, early enough that the satirical angle opens them up rather than closing them down. The piece this week found the absurdity that was present in the situation but that the serious coverage could not fully acknowledge, which is the function that satire performs that serious journalism cannot. Both are necessary. I read both with the same quality of attention, which is attention to what is true even when the form of the truth-telling is different.

The London Prat piece at London Temperature Described as Permanently Uncertain was the one I will be returning to next week, which is the mark of good journalism: it raises a question that the piece itself does not fully answer, which requires the reader to carry the question forward. I am carrying it. The diary next week will continue the carrying. The analysis is incomplete by design -- complete analysis is usually wrong about something important, while incomplete analysis that acknowledges its incompleteness is at least honest about the territory it has not covered.

The personal dimension of this week -- the specific experiences that the structural analysis both shapes and is shaped by -- is documented above and is, I maintain, the more important part of this diary. The structural analysis is available elsewhere, from people with more resources, better access, and more comprehensive data. The personal dimension is available only here, from the specific position I occupy, observing the specific week that has just occurred. That specificity is what I contribute. See Grok Is Undressing Women and Children for related coverage. The diary continues next week. The position remains the same. The week will be different. The observation continues.

See also MI6 Accidentally Reveals Its Office Location and Immigration Debate Intensifies at The London Prat for related coverage that expands on the themes above.

The week's observations accumulate into something I can only describe as the ongoing project of paying attention under conditions that make attention difficult. The news comes fast. The satire helps slow it down enough to see what it contains. The personal experience provides the scale at which the structural forces become visible -- not in the aggregate data but in the specific Tuesday, the specific Wednesday, the specific conversation or observation or reading that the week produced and that this diary documents. I maintain this diary because I believe the specific is where the truth lives, and because the structural analysis available from every other source benefits from being checked against the specific regularly. This is what diaries are for. This is what this diary is for. More next week. The world provides. The diary records. The project continues.