Remembrance Sunday

I awoke this morning, 10.20am-ish, on the sofa; to the dulcet tones of David Dimbleby; and the vista of London's Whitehall are, deserted for an oblonged throng of people around the Cenotaph. Something compelled me to stay with the images of the procession; the bands, the ceremony and so on.

   Now, I have lived in London all my live, my Grandad fought in World War II, my Dad in the Fawklands; My Nan was a Royalist on the quiet, well not so quiet - so there is a lot in me, without me knowing, that strikes a cord inside. But they never (as far as I know) ever went to Whitehall on Remembrance Sunday, and neither have I. I always buy a poppy, and then subsequently lose it because I cannot do the pin thing right... None of this is of any consequence, what I am about to do, is qualify something that a lot of people secretly think or do but never dare to say.... 

I for a large chunk of my juvenile life been self-obsessed, and therefore had not been equipped to take in the scope of other people's life, the world or humanity in general; in adolescence, I developed a 'mentally-ill' persona, something I became secretly stuck with and couldn't shake off... well I am shaking now; and now I try to genuinely connect with the outside world.

When faced with WWI & WWII and how we remember all those who gave their lives, and I mean the phrase, because it is a service, a belief of the soldier, armaments worker, civil-servant, shop-keeper, night-warden and so on, that not as an indiviudual but a cog, one of many, many cogs in a wheel that will roll towards the freedom, and the emphatic refusal to give in to pervading evil, that's what is awe-inspiring about these people. The dignity in that idea, that being part of something; this even goes up to something such as Afghanistan; although the political ideals behind it may be more complex, the ideology of the soldier itself is the same; such as the soldier who died clearing a bomb-laden pathway for the fellow soldiers to go forward, gave his life so that could happen - in the inner workings of itself - it does mean something for the whole.

  And the process of understanding why we remember The Glorious Dead, is just as important, it is meme, in our lifetime, all the people that were involved in WW2 will be dead, and all that will be left will be a memory, this memory has to endure; because in the end, all their fighting, all the death and heartache and agony and pain, was to preserve the idea of something; of course, it's a highly emotive subject, and people can be very offended at the lack of respect for War Veteran and people currently serving alike. My heart went out especially to the former soldiers who marched suffering from Combat-Stress.

  Trying to emote to something difficult, outside one's immediate surroundings, to something that does not directly affect them, can be hard, but it is benefitial, and it's not selfish, bad or wrong not to understand, I think people just go 'Oh I don't understand or DON'T KNOW HOW I SHOULD REACT to this' that makes us shy away, made me shy away.

But I sat down and had a good think about it, and it's unimaginable to take in the magnitude of loss of life; to think of the number of deaths and take it in; I just imagine the grief you experience when you lose someone you love, a family member, in the full flow of life, through no fault of their own, and times it by 100 million; to g through each and every one takes more than a lifetime. And of course the remembrance serves as a respectful footnote.

I would like to finish by remarking on the sadness in the eyes of The Queen and even The Prime-Minister, it's a shared grief we all have.

P.S - I will make a concerted effort to attend next year. (And get a Poppy that stays on).