Hope the world will remember

Before the Berlin Wall fell I visited old Leningrad and saw something more astonishing there than a shop without a mile-long queue.

At a war memorial, a wedding car pulled up and out got a just-married couple who placed a bouquet next to an eternal flame. They stood silently, heads bowed for a minute, before heading off to the reception.

It’s a Russian tradition aimed at making young people remember on the happiest day of their lives, the millions who laid down their lives to make their happiness possible.

I doubt it would happen here for a few reasons: The bride’s mother would moan about statues of bayonetted men ruining the video and the possibility of the flame setting alight her daughter’s frock, while male guests would kick off about the delay in getting to the free bar. I mention it on this November 11 as a reminder it’s not just us who mourn our war dead. You don’t have to wear a poppy or be a frothing patriot of whatever country you come from to think of all those who fell in wars, some of which were just and some wrong and futile.

You only have to have a heart. And hope in it that if another war that is wrong and futile looks like starting, enough people have the balls to tell the egomaniac politicians causing it where to go.