Category Archives: Postcards 2023

Unknown's avatar

Feels like spring, so time for something new

by

The weather here is bizarrely balmy, so I feel encouraged to add some of my own ‘unexpected’.

Over the next week or so I plan to introduce you properly to Simi, Rudd, and the others, in the imagined world that I hope may one day turn into something with actual pages. If you have had the time, or inclination, to read earlier postcards you may have met some of these characters already. I think we left them caught up in the hazards of wedding planning in a remote part of Zimabwe. Now I hope to take you to the beginning of their story.

I have written a full draft of this, but every time I sit down to re-read what is already done, I find the characters running away with ideas of their own, or else deciding they no longer wish to be portrayed in the way I thought we’d agreed. They seem to be particularly difficult about tense, and point of view at the moment. So, anything might appear here, and it may never be the same again.

Whatever happens I hope it will be entertaining. Suggestions welcome … at least, I hope they will be.

(Over the past few years a group of writers has helped me try to bring some sort of order to this unruly, evolving tale. My thanks always to them, and to you for reading!)

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

Unknown's avatar

There has to be hope

by

The insistent snowdrop. Some say it is a miracle, and others a sign of hope. To me it is a reminder of the life we cannot measure.

While climate change, politics, wars and greed, rattle around the world, hope and snowdrops keep coming. You can ignore them or admire them, they don’t mind. Their pulse is not ours.

Here in England, when the Christmas lights go out in early January, Galanthus begins to push its way up through the fallen leaves. In February, as the fog thickens over layers of frost and damp, the small green shoots are stretching inch by inch to their allocated height. Then, when the time is just right, they shake out their petals like tiny linen sheets. Each hangs suspended, still as washing on a windless day. They are bright white in the gloom, immaculate and untouchable, poisonous to deer, and to rodents.

As we wilt through the drab winter, they survive – there not to surrender, but to encourage.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

Unknown's avatar

Gosport and the Canadians

by

Not sure if this photograph can give you a sense of just how cold it was in the wind today at Stokes Bay, Gosport. We’d come to have lunch at Pebbles Fish and Wine Bar.

It was only once inside, warm and waiting for food, that we saw through the window the stone commemorating the Canadian troops who took part in the D Day landings. It’s not a big stone.

This evening I did a little research. It seems that right where we’d been enjoying delicious fresh fish and hot chips, young Canadian service personnel had once packed the beach front, preparing to launch themselves into a war thousands of miles from home. I can’t imagine how they felt, preparing to fight for, and against, nations many of them may never even have visited.

Other than the rock we saw no sign of them, nor of the docks from which they set off. The only traces I did see were in the freedom of the windblown families who came and went around us.

Here is some footage I found of those preparations and departures from Stokes Bay in 1944 (The last video of the three – around five minutes each – is to do with the Canadians)

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023