Category Archives: My own

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The news at the end of a wet week

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I caught snatches of today’s news as we quarter-circled around the M25 out of London. Here’s what I heard.

First up were a prince, his spokesman and paper dragons. The spokesman said that getting burned was the price the prince had to pay for fighting dragons. Meanwhile a paper dragon flamed about suntans, California, and sharing breathing space with the truth. It seems the prince and the paper dragons are not done yet.

Then we heard of a British teenager, missing for six years, but apparently found recently in the middle of the night. The man who found him was a French student working as a delivery driver in his spare time. He saw the youngster wandering along a lonely road near Toulouse and offered him a lift. They got talking, and the story told in the cab that night, and later passed to the police along with the teenager, was about a mother, who ran away with her son and her father. They joined a group leading a nomadic, off-grid life, but the son – the wandering teenager – is now keen to be reunited with his grandmother in England.

It was a strange story, that left us imagining, and was then followed by news of pirates in the Red Sea. There have been attacks and threats, and ships re-routed, and it sounds a lot like things might get worse.

I preferred the account of the grandson heading home.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

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Going to the movies

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“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

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“Be nice to yu turkeys dis christmas …”

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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