Category Archives: Postcards 2023

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The powerful point of Martha’s Rule

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Just occasionally, out of the blue of an ordinary day, comes a voice that cuts through ‘stuff’ true as a sword.

I heard Merope Mills speaking on the morning news and stopped my rush in a heartbeat.

In 2021 her daughter, Martha, not quite 14, fell off her bicycle and injured herself. In hospital her condition deteriorated, but the family were unable to get a second opinion on her treatment in time to save her life. Now Merope Mills is campaigning to change this, to make it easier for patients to get assessed by a different medical team if they or their families are concerned by signs of rapid deterioration, and they feel the care being given is not right.

Every time I hear Merope Mills talk about what she hopes will result from Martha’s Rule, I stop and listen. My blood sinks at her story but my hopes rise at her voice. It sounds so full of scalpeled expertise, so urgent and fresh with pain. I hope it will be able to cut through the ‘systems’ that cost her and her family so dear.

Here’s a link to an article with more information about Martha’s Rule.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

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More ‘modernising and maintenance’

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It’s been one of those hot and bothering kind of days, but I like to think there has been some progress – not much ‘modernising’ perhaps but some ‘maintenance’ of The Phraser site.

This afternoon has been dedicated to retrieving postcards from the draft novel and trying to arrange them in some form of accessible order on the front page. I’m now about two thirds of the way through.

In case you have time to test the improvements please click on the Postcards 2023 heading in the menu bar which should then lead you to Draft of Uprooted. If you slide your cursor across that heading it should drop down to a list of six different groupings (1 – 10; 11 – 18; 19 – 26; 27 – 33; 34 – 39; and 39 – 46). Placing a cursor on each of those should pull up a list of the 500 word sections in each collection.

Hope it works. It’s taken me a while to sort out. Will let you know if/when I finish.

Thanks for reading.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

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Tight as a promise

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On Saturday, a kettle hot day in the south of England, I watered this rose early in the morning. At the time its bud was even tighter than this and I assumed it wasn’t mature yet. I was wrong. Half an hour later I saw it again, wide open and ready for the blazing sun. That’s what heat does I thought, and wandered off.

However, as night fell, the rose’s colour caught my eye and I was amazed to see that its petals had curled back into the position shown in the photograph above.

Today, a cooler day, I watched the rose a little harder and saw that by mid-morning it had repeated the process, and its petals were as open as prayer. I have no idea why the flower does this, and have never seen any other rose do the same. Perhaps I have not been looking closely enough.

I think that what I’m seeing may be something called nyctinasty, and, as far as I can tell from a quick flick through the internet, roses aren’t on the usual list of nyctinastic plants.

If anyone knows anything else, including the name of this rose, I’d love to hear.

(My apologies to David Attenborough if he’s already tried to explain nyctinasty to us a thousand times!)

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023