Category Archives: Postcards 2023

Unknown's avatar

Attention grabbing – the first sentence

by

There are two reasons for this postcard today. The first is a course I did looking at the opening lines in children’s literature, and the second is a headline I heard on today’s news.

I’ll start with the headline. This is from The Straits Times: “US military asks for help finding its lost stealth jet” Losing a stealth jet? Of course I want to know happens next.

It’s the same with the first sentence of each of these novels, picked from the bookcase a few minutes ago.

“Wilson sat on the balcony of the Bedford Hotel with his bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork.” The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene

“I discovered the hiding place because the ball ended up there.” The Day Before Happiness by Erri De Luca

“I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice – not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.” a prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

“Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly.” The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante

“At 7.45 on the morning of November 28, 1931, a young woman in the first stage of labour was handed by her husband into Lismore’s only hackney-car.” Wheels within Wheels – The Making of a Traveller by Dervla Murphy

“There is a fish in the mirror.” This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga

For me, each of the above is like a keyhole, giving a glimpse and tempting me to step inside and close the door.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

Unknown's avatar

The places a book can take you

by

The more I think about books the more amazing I find them.

Take these two. I haven’t opened them yet but I know their pages will be filled with lines of print, and that as soon as I begin to read them I’ll be transported to places and times of which I know barely anything. I also know that if you picked up the same books you’d travel to the same places, and the worlds you’d find would be similar, but not identical to the ones I find. And both of our discoveries would be different to the ones the authors set out to describe, but we’d all experience an exchange of ideas, and ways of seeing the world.

That’s the strange power of reading. Hopefully we’ll never be without it, nor the time it takes to understand words. Video and voice are tempting, and better suited to our fragmented lives, but it would be such a loss if they drowned out the time it takes to read, to think, to care, and to try to understand where we are heading.

If we lose all that, the only writing left might be the writing on the wall.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

Unknown's avatar

Oiling down the science

by

This photograph was taken outside Waterloo Station in London in 2020, when the UK was locked down due to the coronavirus pandemic. The streets were so quiet you could feel the air breathing.

Now we’re back to ‘go’, our emissions trails choking the planet as we rush for growth. And we’re all locked in to the rush – reaching for the quick plastic solution to something, or taking that flight, our guilt moderated by the idea that governments and big business are doing far worse and far bigger.

That’s the problem. Who are these governments? Often the ones we chose. And these companies? Many are the profitable ones with safe, secure shares, good for the pension pot, hooking us all.

Yesterday I read an article in the Wall Street Journal about Exxon, and then found another in The Guardian covering the same story. Apparently, as far back as the 1970s, Exxon’s own scientists predicted the path of global warming with great accuracy, and in 2006 the company publicly acknowledged that fossil fuels did contribute to the problem. However, for many years since, it seems Exxon’s internal direction has been to comfort blanket the climate crisis in the idea that it’s not as bad as the science suggests.

This kind of double messaging nudges many of us to ‘doubt climate science’, to stand blinking as the planet burns, floods, and wind whips itself into chaos around us.

Surely, we need to think better, urgently. The evidence is mounting – climate caused devastation, slow or sudden, is truly calamitous.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023