Thursday 12th November 2009, 14:41
Remember, remember...
...the 11th of November, gunpowder, treason and plot. I’ve been testing at gigs: about half of punters seem to have poppies. Less than usual? Seemed so to me, but who knows. I've felt Poppy Day was more poignant this year, with troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our national presence there being such a topic of debate at the moment.
This summer, my wife and I were delighted to have a little post-wedding luncheon with my Cornish relatives at a really nice hotel on the Cornish coast. A delightful meal with good folks, and we were treated wonderfully by a female maitre d’ (mistress d’?). We got talking to her, and she was a great woman, who had sadly last her husband not long before, and had both her boys being sent overseas to Afghanistan that very next week. Last week, one of her son’s names has been in the news. The day he was due to return, he was killed.
I never met him and barely met her, but remembering his proud mother, the news story has had the horrid title of being the first time that I’ve known in some small way the family/friends of a serviceman killed in a modern war. It adds an awful new dimension to the news story, and indeed to Remembrance Sunday. I'm well aware too that I'm probably part of a minority - more and more Brits have a friend, relative or acquaintance that they've lost in modern warfare.
I vary opinions about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Wiser, better-informed people than I equally waver, so I’m not going to make up an opinion just for the sake of it. I don’t know if they’re fighting unwinnable wars, but troops in both countries are fighting darn hard ones. Seeing the film The Hurt Locker recently gave the merest glint of the tough conditions out there and the frighteningly vague enemy they’re up against. I’m quite pacifist, but I 100% support them now they're out there, especially now that Poppy Day has come around, and especially now I can picture the family of one of these guys.
I don’t want to sound like a crap panellist on The X Factor and use idiotic percentiles twice in one blog post, but I am 110% sure that no soldier is going to read this blog, now or ever, but anyway, I wish ‘em well. I’ve seen the running order of a comedy gig line-up they’re being sent in the next few weeks, and they’ve got some good acts coming their way. They’ve got some crap ones too, but that’s just like any gig in the UK, so at least that should remind them of home. Be well, chaps and chapesses.