Seeing as I disgraced myself on this topic in general discussion some years back...
Will anyone be marking the day this year?
I went last year to Croydon where my son was parading with cadets - and more formed units in the parade also - and was much affected. I had been planning to watch Oli briefly and retire to the shops. My long-held beliefs tell me that I am disgusted by the militarisation of UK society that I have seen slowly develop through the long low intensity wars in Iraq, Afghanistan... Yet last year I was so impacted I stayed and snuck into the back of the service - watching families of Primark-clad women and shiny-dressed children arriving, wondering if they were here for menfolk serving or menfolk dead, it struck me that in market towns and out-of-the-way places all up and down the country people were recognising their own families' sacrifice and the personal loss. The pomp of soldierly uniform and mayoral address that I saw, the dehumanising impact of military ritual that I had so long denigrated - well, perhaps these gave form to the feelings of the poor families I watched, maybe for some short hours it took their experience - their suffering? - from liminal space into the mainstream.
This year I look, and for all last year there were some hundreds marchers in my South London outpost, and they outnumbered by watchers, for Croydon remembrance there is no google result will tell me what time I should ask my family to assemble and watch. And now my son saying he wants to join the military, and his mother thinking how does she learn she cannot say no to his growing wish, and myself less certain with each passing day of paternal confidence that my 15-year old will tire of his wish to fly fast jets before his life choices are truly made. How can there be such a vital and impactful event so soon to be made flesh in my community and the internet tells me nothing of it?
We here gather round - it is one hundred years in 2014 since the Great War began, and in my country there is a swelling of noise as the discourse coheres around that. For us it it the epochal moment where we name suffering and devotion to country without the rancour of today's politics entering ... but I know, because I make my living from selling the futures of anniversaries, that this national feel does not reach worldwide, that in North America, the Great War is a footnote, that in Europe there are still wounds that dismember us even from such a distant date.
I am a man who has in the past worn white poppies at this time in the year to hold out for peace, and now this year, when I'm the same age my grandfather was when he landed with marines on a Pacific atoll, telling it afterwards as a story humourous about himself and inordinately respectful to those who landed with him, I know it this year is the first time I have planned where I will be standing, and where I will go on to join a service, and how I will bring my family there, and so just wondering, does this mean anything, easy or difficult, to any of you and what will you be doing?
