Eleventh Hour...

Quite. How can anyone call himself a gentleman - howso'er loosely one defines the term - and yet have Christmas Carols blaring out in his shop in Armistice Day? H is right of course and one mustn't have a row, nonetheless a voiced opinion that this was a step just too far and a slight on the Old Contemptibles as much as on the Church - meeting I might add with an audible 'Hear, hear' from other waiting customers - was in order.

Oddly enough and coinciding with some heated - if unilluminating - public debate on the wearing of the poppy this year, I am sure I have noticed a decline in the numbers of people seen out and about with one. Even I, who bought mine, per usual, when they first went on sale, only thought actually to pin it on this very morning. And a number of the parish war widows - husbands who fought and died in Burma, Africa, Italy or France - have not been wearing a poppy at all this year.

Could it be that as a society - and we of the Wolds are as much our own society as a part of the wider world - we are losing touch (or even worse, faith) with symbolic and customary shows of public historic solidarity? I do wonder if all that we have witnessed of a shameless undermining of truth, probity and values by Mr Blair and his cronies has made everyone shy away from displays of belief. We have witnessed so many moments when that ludicrous man has appropriated anything decent to use as a screen for his indecency. We have suffered so many abuses of reality to shore up his unreality. I do believe we no longer wish to be any part of any public act he might barge into, with that cheezy 'gosh but I'm trying guys' grin, or that pseudo-sanctimonious Bambi-flutter-eyes look.

It could be too that where once we could 'remember' war because essentially it was over, we now tremble and fear dismemberment as war is among us once again. (You don't need a preacher to tell you whom I hold responsible for that either!)

There was a certain safe distance, as well as beauty and purpose, in saying to ourselves on behalf of the fallen "Tell them of us and say, For their tomorrow, We gave our today", yet now we fear we might in an uncertain future have those very words said of us, and in that fear lies our reticence.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning we will remember them, and pray God we remain so that we might.