Entertainment For Lively Minds
The Remembrance
Posted by Graham Johns on 12 November 2009 - 1:20am.
I'm working in a village outside Rochdale called Milnrow. At lunchtime I paid my respects to the fallen at the memorial gardens there - so many names on the plinth for such a small place, including six men with the surname Butterworth. I felt a little of Milnrow's abiding sense of loss as I looked at the wreaths neatly laid there. And I reminded myself to post this by a genius from over the Pennines in Leeds
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Spent a week
in the Ypres area during half term......I think everyone should do it at some point. It's incredibly moving when you're seeing rows of graves from the same regiment, died on the same day. You just wonder what hell they all went through.
Yes, it somehow brings the horror alive to actually stand there.
I went on a trip with school when I was about 13 round various battlefields in France and Belgium. I still vividly remember feeling very moved by each place and it's story.
Third time
I've been there.....the first time was with 40 schoolkids (I was a tagalong on a school trip my wife organised). Had to keep wandering off because I had a bit of grit or something in my eye. And the silence at the Menin Gate never fails to bring a lump to the throat.
May they RIP
It might just be me but have the government, Whitehall, America and 'the media' colluded in the last three or so years to show or tell as
many war stories from the past in order to somehow justify or acclimatise us to what's happening in Afghanistan?
In my local library and Waterstones book store, books on the two wars out-number those on the 20s, 30s or 50s at least fifty to one.
The only comparable subjects are, incredibly, East End crime and football hooliganism (mini industries both).
The local news station I watch on Sky ('Spotlight' in the South West) carries a story about Afghanistan, normally a bad one, on every single week day night.
And then the press, radio and/or TV tell us we 'must not forget'!
We haven't had the chance if any of us had wanted to!
It's time this country started thinking a little bit about peace time......it's what Harry Patch would have wanted, he hated war and said so.
Another musical comment.
And another thing.
Please read Gordon Corrigan's "Mud, Blood and Poppycock". A revisionist account of WW1 backed up by cast-iron statistics. A few conclusions in it are a bit shaky but his explanation of what The Somme was all about and how the myths around it and other battles have arisen is fascinating and entirely understandable.