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A visit to the Victoria and Albert Museum

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“The excellence of every art must consist in the complete accomplishment of its purpose” (Sir Joshua Reynolds)

This photograph is of these words displayed in sections above the Cromwell Road entrance.

I had another adventure in the V&A today. The purpose of the visit this time was to meet friends and to look at ceramics. It was a wonderful day with both missions achieved, although without the time to complete all the ceramics.

Today, just as on each of my other occasional visits to the V&A, I got profoundly lost. However, the getting lost came with the usual bonuses: one, stumbling across treasures I never meant to find, and two, achieving a record number of steps trying to get from A to B. I had no intention of going past Z, or even looking at F, but as soon as I lost sight of A, I found myself lost as a ‘traveller in an antique land’, bumping into Ozymandias and at least another dozen despairing souls at every turn.

In the end, getting lost felt like a necessary part of the whole experience, so unavoidable that it left me wondering whether disorientated guests were now considered an exhibit in their own right – their “excellence” dependent of course, on them achieving the “complete accomplishment” of their purpose.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

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Ukraine – filling our news today

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There has been a lot about Ukraine in our news recently. The country is never forgotten, but I’ve heard and seen its name a little more often over the last day or two. The difficulty is that when the media spotlight sharpens its focus, it’s hard to look, and hard to look away.

The human cost of this war is truly shocking, and the price is being paid by both sides. Already there are thousands of bereaved families and thousands of amputees, and yet still bodies are flung towards each other, tasked with the deadly burden of advancing.

As I carry on with my daily niffnaff far from Ukraine, I struggle to imagine these blood-soaked lands, Ukraine’s and others, where bombs fall into buildings, soldiers serve, families crumble, and so many brutalised bodies lose their minds. How is it that we are all under the same sky, and yet we are unable to co-exist in peace and respect?

Should we not listen to each other a little harder? Try to hear each other a little better? Force ourselves to keep our attention nailed to the hope that evenutally our compassion might prove stronger than our greed, our pride, our cruelty?

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

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A book full of pictures and hope

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I was given this book at almost the same time as I finished Demon Copperhead.

Demon Copperhead, as long as a battle, wound me in beside its main character to witness the traumas of his growing up, while The Last Tree – A Seed of Hope, by Luke Adam Hawker, is very different.

This book spun me like a leaf through its roots, allowing me to drift along with its young protagonist Olive when she loses touch with her classmates on a visit to the Tree Museum. There she becomes absorbed by a picture of The Last Tree. She sits in front of it, imagining how it would have been to climb trees and to live amongst them. At the end of the visit, when the class leaves for home, she is eager to see her father, and is clutching a seed that they will plant together for the generations to come.

That’s the story, but it’s the illustrations – pages of lovely drawings in black and white – that really pull the narrative wide, exploring and imagining through the eyes of a small child in a big world, and using only a few lines of text to do so.

I loved this book. It’s gentle but intense, and hard to resist flicking through again and again.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023