Unknown's avatar

More ‘modernising and maintenance’

by

It’s been one of those hot and bothering kind of days, but I like to think there has been some progress – not much ‘modernising’ perhaps but some ‘maintenance’ of The Phraser site.

This afternoon has been dedicated to retrieving postcards from the draft novel and trying to arrange them in some form of accessible order on the front page. I’m now about two thirds of the way through.

In case you have time to test the improvements please click on the Postcards 2023 heading in the menu bar which should then lead you to Draft of Uprooted. If you slide your cursor across that heading it should drop down to a list of six different groupings (1 – 10; 11 – 18; 19 – 26; 27 – 33; 34 – 39; and 39 – 46). Placing a cursor on each of those should pull up a list of the 500 word sections in each collection.

Hope it works. It’s taken me a while to sort out. Will let you know if/when I finish.

Thanks for reading.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

Unknown's avatar

Tight as a promise

by

On Saturday, a kettle hot day in the south of England, I watered this rose early in the morning. At the time its bud was even tighter than this and I assumed it wasn’t mature yet. I was wrong. Half an hour later I saw it again, wide open and ready for the blazing sun. That’s what heat does I thought, and wandered off.

However, as night fell, the rose’s colour caught my eye and I was amazed to see that its petals had curled back into the position shown in the photograph above.

Today, a cooler day, I watched the rose a little harder and saw that by mid-morning it had repeated the process, and its petals were as open as prayer. I have no idea why the flower does this, and have never seen any other rose do the same. Perhaps I have not been looking closely enough.

I think that what I’m seeing may be something called nyctinasty, and, as far as I can tell from a quick flick through the internet, roses aren’t on the usual list of nyctinastic plants.

If anyone knows anything else, including the name of this rose, I’d love to hear.

(My apologies to David Attenborough if he’s already tried to explain nyctinasty to us a thousand times!)

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

Unknown's avatar

Spare a thought for chickens in this heat

by

Earlier this week I heard a report on the radio that said that factory farm chickens are raised to gain weight so quickly that their legs cannot support them. The image has haunted me ever since I heard that. Then today, with temperatures around 32°C, the hauntings got worse. How are those poor chickens surviving?

It only took a little internet searching to throw up truly horrific stories about the welfare of factory farm chickens. I added the word ‘hot’ to the search and came across the news that during the heatwave that hit the UK in August 2022, millions of chickens died, many of them crammed into sheds where the temperatures could reach as high as 45°C. The birds were squashed in so close to each other that there was nothing they could do to save themselves.

Today is supposed to be the peak of the current heatwave here. I really hope that our insatiable drive for profit and savings has not resulted in millions more chickens being left to stew.

Surely we can’t carry on eating so much suffering?

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023