Right to celebrate courage of those who died in Great War

Iwas surprised – even amazed – on Sunday morning when Mrs B leapt to her feet and shot out to open the front door of Barton Towers. The stimulus for this unusual behaviour had been the distant tinkling of glockenspiels and the tapping of drums. The sound was quite below a level to impinge on the normal ear but, once the door was opened, the source became clear. It was a military parade forming part of the Remembrance Day celebrations.

‘Celebrations’ may seem an inappropriate word to apply to a Remembrance Day event but, alongside the deep sorrow felt for all those young men whose lives had been tragically destroyed, it seems to me only right to celebrate the incredible courage and endurance of those same young men who had fought so long and hard in the war that was ‘to end all wars’.

So Mrs B stood at our front door to watch the parade pass by. I was a little surprised to hear that she had been joined by our LND (Lady Next Door, for those who may have missed an earlier reference to her Wooden Spoon cake-making enterprise). An understanding was beginning to creep into my mind as the parade passed the entrance to County Square. It was always said that ladies love a man in uniform.

Then into town to pick up a few necessaries. At the checkout of one store, I was surprised to find I was standing behind a row of people of both sexes, all of whom were buying sandwiches.

I had always assumed that people bought prepacked sandwiches as a kind of last resort. Mrs B tells me that the price of such sandwiches is in the region of two to three pounds.

I had a bite of one once. It was ghastly. What passed for bread was pappy and tasteless. It had been smeared (thankfully, thinly) with some kind of oily butter substitute and the filling was meagre – but then it would have to be in order to allow the abomination to be packed into its plastic coffin. Have people stopped having proper lunches?