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The places a book can take you

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The more I think about books the more amazing I find them.

Take these two. I haven’t opened them yet but I know their pages will be filled with lines of print, and that as soon as I begin to read them I’ll be transported to places and times of which I know barely anything. I also know that if you picked up the same books you’d travel to the same places, and the worlds you’d find would be similar, but not identical to the ones I find. And both of our discoveries would be different to the ones the authors set out to describe, but we’d all experience an exchange of ideas, and ways of seeing the world.

That’s the strange power of reading. Hopefully we’ll never be without it, nor the time it takes to understand words. Video and voice are tempting, and better suited to our fragmented lives, but it would be such a loss if they drowned out the time it takes to read, to think, to care, and to try to understand where we are heading.

If we lose all that, the only writing left might be the writing on the wall.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

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Oiling down the science

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This photograph was taken outside Waterloo Station in London in 2020, when the UK was locked down due to the coronavirus pandemic. The streets were so quiet you could feel the air breathing.

Now we’re back to ‘go’, our emissions trails choking the planet as we rush for growth. And we’re all locked in to the rush – reaching for the quick plastic solution to something, or taking that flight, our guilt moderated by the idea that governments and big business are doing far worse and far bigger.

That’s the problem. Who are these governments? Often the ones we chose. And these companies? Many are the profitable ones with safe, secure shares, good for the pension pot, hooking us all.

Yesterday I read an article in the Wall Street Journal about Exxon, and then found another in The Guardian covering the same story. Apparently, as far back as the 1970s, Exxon’s own scientists predicted the path of global warming with great accuracy, and in 2006 the company publicly acknowledged that fossil fuels did contribute to the problem. However, for many years since, it seems Exxon’s internal direction has been to comfort blanket the climate crisis in the idea that it’s not as bad as the science suggests.

This kind of double messaging nudges many of us to ‘doubt climate science’, to stand blinking as the planet burns, floods, and wind whips itself into chaos around us.

Surely, we need to think better, urgently. The evidence is mounting – climate caused devastation, slow or sudden, is truly calamitous.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

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Feeling the heat in the City

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Who would want to saunter along hot pavements, in heavy feathers? Not these birds. These are City pigeons – they make plans, and they know places.

This last, humid week I came across two pigeon pool parties. The group photographed above were enjoying the relative cool of Postman’s Park, while just across the road, there was a more lofty party in the top tier of the fountain in the courtyard of St Bartholomew’s Hospital. There was much splashing and shaking of tail feathers.

I hope they enjoyed themselves, because there are peregrine falcons about, some thirty pairs of them in London. The closest pair to these pigeons was probably the pair who enjoy the view from the Tate Modern. If either of those deadly birds was in the skies above, I think it could have taken its pick from this party. The pigeons would not have stood a chance, not against a bolt from the blue with a diving speed of around two hundred miles per hour … way too fast for even the most athletic of these splashers to have grabbed their towels and flapped for cover.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023