Category Archives: My own

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Sorry now it’s gone

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This is a thank you to a young shop, that turned a dark corner bright, during the lock/unlock days of Covid. Sadly, without enough customers, the shop has had to close.

We shall miss it. Purely selfish, but we loved knowing it was there. On some days, the space it occupied with such welcome, felt so sunny, that we might have been on faraway shores.

Now there is a gap in our lives, and in that gap there is a feeling of guilt. We were happy, occasional customers, serving our needs, not thinking about what the shop might need to benefit as much as we did, from it being there. We were careless, and are now sorry to have lost a business with such heart.

My thanks to the little wine shop, for the light it brought in the dark days. I hope that in the future we’ll do better at supporting the physical businesses that add so much to our lives.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

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Ukraine – always in our news

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This flag was flying in New Zealand when I was there last year.

Wherever I see the flag, the blue and yellow seem so full of sunshine and hope, despite the bitter assault faced by the country it flies for.

Ukraine has been in the UK news for over a year now. We hear daily of devastation, too horrifying to believe at times, and yet it is happening – families, lives, whole towns are being destroyed. And the abuse is multiplying, continuing through the freeze of winter.

As we listen, one question, keeps repeating in my heart. Surely we cannot be doing this to each other now? History is flooded with needless bloodshed, but that is history. Surely not now?

And yet the scarring continues. Last Saturday in Dnipro, an apartment block full of life was shelled. A few days ago a helicopter crashed on to a kindergarten. And all the while, thousands of troops on both sides are losing their lives.

The trauma reaches us daily through the media. Like a muffled pain it throbs incessantly, flaring suddenly with news of a disaster, or stilling briefly, before hopes of talks collapse. It seems wrong to continue our day to day around it, but that is what we do.

And over us, and in between us and our every day lives, the beautiful flag keeps flying.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

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The pleasure of reading

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Reading with children has been one of my greatest pleasures for decades.

At first I read with my own children, but now they are grown, I read with other people’s. I can’t begin to describe the worlds we’ve seen. We are explorers, our way led by libraries.

In the early days of reading with my children it was the illustrations that mattered, each taking us deeper into the stories. Then gradually the pictures vanished from the books we chose. Our imaginations became the artists, and we painted with the print on the page. Now my sons read more than I can ever read, visiting complexities and lives I shall never know. That is their magic, and my pleasure is trying to pass some of that on, although often it is children who return it to me.

They arrive with books that make them laugh, or that frighten them. Books that tell them stuff, or explain. Together we read through them, looking, and unlocking what’s on the page.

The more I do the reading, the more I am in awe of the power of print. No screens, no audio, and yet still the stories unfold.

Perhaps we all need to read a little more. To slow down. To switch off the screens, and the audio. To sit in silence, and turn the pages of a book. It is a kind of oasis, a place shared with others on their own journeys.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023