It’s almost Remembrance Day. Around here, in our gardens and along our footpaths, we don’t grow red poppies, only yellow and orange one. But still red poppies are everywhere.
It must be a couple of weeks ago that we noticed Gary Lineker on Match of the Day, wearing a discreet little poppy badge as he did his football match analysis. It was clearly a nice little enamel affair, the sort that you could recycle or re-use from one year to the next, which seems to defeat the object of buying a poppy to help fund old former soldiers in need. It was nothing like the poppies that they used to sell to us in school when we were children. Do they still do that? i wonder. Reliable top juniors would be sent around from classroom to classroom with a tray of poppies to sell to their fellow pupils, together with a straight pin to attach the poppies to your clothes. Its quite likely that nowadays giving out straight pins to schoolchildren would be against some health and safety ruling or other.
But getting back to Gary Lineker, there he was with his little poppy badge. Are those enamel badges even made by the same people who make the cloth pin-on poppies? Does the money from their sale go to the Royal British Legion to support former soldiers in difficult times? Whatever the answer to those questions, anyone who appears on television as a newsreader, commentator or pundit of any kind, or indeed a politician, must be seen to be patriotically wearing a poppy. It once was just on Remembrance Day that you were expected to wear a poppy but now there’s quite a long build-up.
Someone wrote recently in one of the papers! “Once a modest sign of remembrance, the poppy has increasingly been used as a prop for performative patriotism, and a way to gauge others’ loyalty to an ideal of national sacrifice.” One of our local primary schools has decorated the trees on the drive with large poppies. The haberdashery shop in the village has changed its display from pumpkins to poppies. Postboxes are adorned with crocheted and knitted poppies. Even the Angel of the North has an enormous poppy.
It’s become somewhat obligatory for public figures to display their patriotism, even though a spokesperson for the Royal British Legion said, “If anyone doesn’t want to wear a poppy, we’re on their side. It has to be a personal choice or it loses its meaning. But although we produce the poppy, we don’t own it as such, it belongs to the nation.”
And woe betide you if you wear a white poppy, as Jeremy Corbyn did some years ago. I had thought white poppies were a relatively recent thing but it seems they were introduced in 1934 by the Peace Pledge Union as a pacifist symbol to commemorate military and civilian victims of war. Margaret Thatcher disapproved of them! Enough said!
In Paris they are holding then trial of the people whom plotted the Bataclan massacre six years ago. How slowly justice moves! The actual perpetrators were mostly killed on the day but their fellow conspirators now face justice. It must be with mixed feelings that the families, mostly parents, of those killed and those survivors of the events follow the proceedings and give their accounts.
I was struck by the account of one young survivor who had suffered what I suppose was a kind of survivor’s guilt. For a long time he had vague, inexplicable feeling of having done something wrong. Surely he was a victim? Eventually he had a treatment which is apparently used for people suffering from post-traumatic stress, a treatment that brought back memories of the day, when he pushed and trampled over others in his fear and his need to escape. The treatment gave him an explanation but didn’t give him peace of mind.
At the trial he said he wanted to ask forgiveness from anyone who had been hurt by him in his panicked haste. He hoped that there might be someone who heard him. And he left. Then it seems another witness described how, knocked down and trampled on as he tried to get out, he had suffered two broken ribs. Maybe it was the previous witness who had trampled him if so, he wanted him to know that he was fine, he was alive and well and wanted the previous young man to know he didn’t blame him. But that young man was already gone. A lawyer, listening to the accounts, left the courtroom and chased after the first young man, eventually catching up with him and telling him what had been said.
Sometimes life throws up unexpected bits of kindness!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
No comments:
Post a Comment