Category Archives: Postcards 2023

Unknown's avatar

The sun came out today

by

This morning dawned sunny and soft, the light sparkling with moisture and the leaves still clinging on.

It’s been a relief to see the sun after all the rain that has been scrolling over us recently, sometimes pausing, its attention leaving everything soaked. But the conditions we’re experiencing are little more than wet compared to other parts. In the north of England, and in Scotland, in particular its east coast, the rain has been drenching and persistent. It looks like the conditions there became unnerving over the weekend – properly wet and frightening for those caught in the worst of it.

However today, here in the south, this morning came along. It peeped into the room first thing, and has kept shining all day, bringing the warmth with it. It’s been the perfect time to be outside London. The grass is green, most of the trees still have their leaves, roses are budding and blooming, the birds are singing, and occasional bees can still be seen buzzing to and fro. Hard to believe it’s not long until the end of October.

Then this evening I looked out of the window and stopped what I was doing. There was the moon sliced clean in half, right down its middle, hanging like half a pearl in the clear sky, so balanced and calm. Apparently it’s a first quarter moon. It would be nice if some of its tranquillity could be passed down to us.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

Unknown's avatar

The Christian Watt Papers

by

“There was so much talk of war it made me feel ill.”

A hectic fortnight has meant that it’s taken me longer than it should have to read this book, but I’m now into the final third and just as fascinated as I was at the start.

From the beginning the voice of Christian Watt is as strong as the cover suggests. She has such a sense of who she is that her personality still reaches out loud and clear two centuries after she was born.

Like others in the fishing community where she was born her life is hard, but it becomes increasingly difficult when she starts to lose those she loves or depends on. When her husband is drowned she becomes utterly impoverished and exhausted, the effort of providing for their many children eventually destroying her mental health to such an extent that she is finally admitted to the asylum in Aberdeen on a permanent basis. It is there that she starts to write.

She writes about the different dialects still being spoken around Scotland, and of the pittance being paid by a “grateful nation” to a veteran of the Battle of Waterloo. She has no time for the pompous or pretentious, and is “furious at a society which forced bairns to work.” She wishes that better pay and working conditions could have been enshrined at the start of the Industrial Revolution, and she is scathing about the concentration camps of the Boer War.

Here is what she has to say about the arrival of the Great War.

“Never did I think I would live to see the day when the enemy would be coming out of the sky. They were flying in the air like birds and going down in the sea like fishes, and the world was running with blood.”

She loses family and friends at Gallipoli, Ypres and the Somme.

“No person wants to kill another. It is politicians who start wars and expect others to fight them.”

I am looking forward to reading what she has to say in the final hundred or so pages I have left.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

Unknown's avatar

Moving to planet No Phone

by

I did not plan to move, but suddenly I found myself there – stranded on planet No Phone.

The day was always going to be hectic but we hadn’t allowed for the sudden pause in the middle of it. That was what caught us off guard. We were in the innocent process of changing venues when a little Italian restaurant crossed our path. It had photographs of Sofia Loren and Totò, and a menu that said all the right things. So in we crept to share a swift, delicious bruschetta and pere con speck e gorgonzola. Then we left, picking up a takeaway coffee from next door, and some chocolate from a shop on a street corner a little further on.

We began to miss the mobile at the end of the long drive that followed. The omens did not feel good. We searched everywhere. We called it. We pleaded with it. Blood pressures soared. Then sank. Then turned to desperate calm as we tried a few memory games to try and track the phone. Finally we agreed we’d lost it, and started to call the places we’d been. The results were not encouraging. Not everybody answered, and those that did had no clue where the mobile might be. With no tracking switched on, our hopes sank. Then as the dark crept around us we rang it one more time … and it answered.

Discovered on stepping-stone number three. All safe. Hadn’t missed us, and said it was happy to be collected tomorrow. Phew.

A little more time to relax, and watch planet Phone go scrolling by.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023