Category Archives: Postcards 2023

Unknown's avatar

Going to the movies

by

“Don’t you go to the movies?” “Mostly just to eat popcorn in the dark.” Charles Bukowski

It’s cold out there. It’s winter out there. It’s madness out there. Feels like just the right time to get out there and go to the movies.

“Movie? Surely you mean film?”

Well, fairly surely, I’m sticking to movie, and this brilliant article on the movie versus film debate is one of the reasons why. It seems movie has bounced into our vocabulary like a grey squirrel, and pushed little film out on to a lonely, professional limb.

Then there’s the what to watch question. Not sure what we’ll go to see yet, but just the idea of it is helping to shift the dark. For me there is such pleasure in sitting in the popcorn gloom of a cinema, surrounded by strangers and their mobiles until the lights go out. Then the small screens disappear and off we fly, all of us together, to another world.

We could, of course, be transported from in front of our television or a laptop, but it always feels like an edge is missing. Like we’ve cheated. How can we properly go to the planet Tatooine, or the Mushroom Kingdom, or Barbie Land, or Into the Void, on a sofa by ourselves?

And besides, homemade popcorn may be good, but it hasn’t got that cost-us-way-too-much pop about it.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

Unknown's avatar

“Be nice to yu turkeys dis christmas …”

by

Christmas is settling in around us, mushrooming up through the pavements and jangling out from the shops. We know the traditions, and we know it’s never a good time for turkeys.

This Christmas I’ll remember the turkeys, and the British poet and writer Benjamin Zephaniah who died on 7 December of this year at the age of 65. Born in Birmingham, and the eldest of nine children, he knew first hand the realities of racism, domestic abuse, borstal, and prison. He was dyslexic, and by his early teens he was out of school but already he was getting known as a poet. And the poems kept coming.

Talking Turkeys was published in 1994. It feels funny and joyful, just as he so often seemed himself, but there are messages tucked inside the poem’s feathers, ones that perhaps we’re more inclined to take notice of now, than we might have been when the poem first came out almost two decades ago.

Here it is if you’d like a listen:

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

Unknown's avatar

Is this tree breathing in the morning sun?

by

On a bright sunny morning, after a long period of wet and cold, I saw this old lime tree steaming in the sun. Or was it breathing? I’ve searched the internet to find the answer but I am still not sure what it was doing.

I do know now that tree bark has ‘lenticles’ which, according to the Mirriam -Webster dictionary, are a “loose agregation of cells which penetrates the surface (as of a stem) of a woody plant and through which gases are exchanged between the atmosphere and the underlying tissues”.

According to another piece I read, bark does what it can to protect trees from the equivalent of frostbite in freezing weather by helping to moderate the change between the outside and the core temperatures. I think I have understood that correctly, but it’s all a little confusing late on a Sunday evening, with Google referring me to scientific papers as dense as forest, which I’m floating around like a lost leaf.

Anyway, the end result is that I’m still left with more question than answer – would the bark of a recently pollarded tree have to work especially hard to keep the tree balanced as temperatures and rainfall swirl around it? Would it be ‘breathing’ hard?

If anyone knows the answers I’d love to hear.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023