Tag Archives: pigeons

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The news at the end of a wet week

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I caught snatches of today’s news as we quarter-circled around the M25 out of London. Here’s what I heard.

First up were a prince, his spokesman and paper dragons. The spokesman said that getting burned was the price the prince had to pay for fighting dragons. Meanwhile a paper dragon flamed about suntans, California, and sharing breathing space with the truth. It seems the prince and the paper dragons are not done yet.

Then we heard of a British teenager, missing for six years, but apparently found recently in the middle of the night. The man who found him was a French student working as a delivery driver in his spare time. He saw the youngster wandering along a lonely road near Toulouse and offered him a lift. They got talking, and the story told in the cab that night, and later passed to the police along with the teenager, was about a mother, who ran away with her son and her father. They joined a group leading a nomadic, off-grid life, but the son – the wandering teenager – is now keen to be reunited with his grandmother in England.

It was a strange story, that left us imagining, and was then followed by news of pirates in the Red Sea. There have been attacks and threats, and ships re-routed, and it sounds a lot like things might get worse.

I preferred the account of the grandson heading home.

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

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Finding Rome – not ancient, just every day

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DSC01338A quick mix of images to show the ordinary, the ‘between-the-monuments’, life of one of the world’s most famous cities – Rome.

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