Category Archives: My own

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Zimbabwe has an election coming up

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My thanks to the United Nations Publication Board for permission to use this map of Zimbabwe, Map No. 4210 Rev.2, December 2017, UNITED NATIONS
(My thanks to the United Nations Publication Board for permission to use this map of Zimbabwe, Map No. 4210 Rev.2, December 2017, UNITED NATIONS)

Zimbabwe has an election coming up, so I thought I’d put together a few points about the country’s recent politics. (If you’re interested in the early history of the area, you might find this Britannica link useful.)

  1. The country became Zimbabwe in 1980.
  2. It is a presidential republic.
  3. Robert Gabriel Mugabe, ZANU-PF (Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front) was the country’s first president, and ruled for 37 years.
  4. There was a ‘soft coup’ in 2017 which removed the 93-year-old Robert Mugabe from power.
  5. He was replaced by Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa – also ZANU-PF.
  6. On the 23 August 2023 Zimbabwe will go to the polls again.
  7. The 80-year-old Emmerson Mnangagwa is standing as the presidential candidate for ZANU-PF.
  8. ZANU-PF has now ruled the country for over four decades.
  9. The main opposition is the Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC) led by 45-year-old Nelson Chamisa.
  10. Since 2000, elections in Zimbabwe have seen bitter contests between ZANU-PF and its main opposition (formerly known as the Movement for Democratic Change – MDC – led by Morgan Tsvangirai).
  11. Today there are allegations that the fairness of the upcoming elections has been damaged by systems that favour ZANU-PF and make it difficult for the opposition to hold rallies, or publicly challenge the government.

I hope we’ll get to see what really happens there in a month’s time.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

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A little more about tomato plants

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A week ago I posted about the smallest of my tomato plants, one of the crop still struggling up from the seeds that I planted from the same packet at the same time, slightly late in the season.

The smallest of the plants is still not making much progress, but today I looked at the biggest of its siblings and discovered these tiny ‘love-apples’ hiding in amongst the leaves. The name love-apple is new to me, and only recently discovered thanks to an old Encylopaedia Britannica, published in 1797, (if I have got the Roman numerals right – MDCCXCVII). This was how it described the tomato, entered under ‘solanum’.

We may have added to the way we eat tomatoes since this entry was listed but, as far as I can discover, they are still classified botanically as berries.

A final piece of tomato trivia that I found out from more recent online sources, is that the world’s largest producer of tomatoes, by far, is China.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

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What do your trainers remind you of?

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I studied my pair of trainers and considered the question – what do they remind me of? A lady on the radio said that hers reminded her of what she was capable of. Mine do not do that for me.

First they remind me of lockdown. These shoes were the pair that I wore during the first spring of the pandemic. We spent those months in the City in London, when that part of the capital was virtually deserted. On our daily walks we covered miles up and down the empty streets and along the Thames, with one of the few other sounds being the thudding footbeat of the occasional runners who passed us. We loved those walks, and since lockdown the habit of walking across London has stayed, but not in these trainers. They have been retired from that duty, and their place taken by a younger pair, better suited to the hard un-give of the pavements.

However, these particular trainers were not retired completely, and their next outing came immediately after lockdown when I decided to test them, and myself, on a longer rural walk – the Cotswold Way. The aim was to walk a hundred miles in a week, to raise money for the favourite charity of a friend who couldn’t do the walk herself. I thought it would be fine after all the miles done on London streets, but there were two big differences. First it was a hot week, and second, the Cotswold Way is very up and down. By the end of the Way I had blisters as big as bath plugs, plus the late learned knowledge that the trainers were too small for the walking socks I’d chosen.

So … what do these trainers remind me of? That I should never have bought the cheapest pairs of walking socks in the shop. If you’re ever in danger of making the same mistake, remember that you may well end up paying more for blister plasters than the good pairs of socks would have cost you in the first place.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023