Remember, remember it’s the 11th of November

The most moving Remembrance Sunday I can recall was back in November 1997. We were having lunch with our friends Steve and Sussan at their home in the quintessentially British village of Sonning, Berkshire.

They lived in a small, thatched, terraced cottage on the main drag, if you can call

it that. More of a country lane. It was the kind of place you’d expect to find Private Godfrey’s sister Dolly in the kitchen, baking another batch of her celebrated upside-down cakes.

Steve’s parents, Jack and Rose, were there, too. During pre-lunch Bloody

Marys, we became aware of activity in the street outside. The parish church, a couple of hundred yards away, had been

staging a service of Remembrance, to honour the village’s war dead.

As we stepped out of the front door, a parade was assembling. Old soldiers,

immaculate in regimental blazers and grey flannels, were joined by former WAAFS, WAACS, army cadets, sea scouts, cubs and guides, along with a smattering of young squaddies and members of the Territorial Army, based in nearby Reading.

Jack wasn’t in the best of health, but he stood ramrod straight alongside us as we watched in silence the parade passing. I’m not ashamed to say that I had a lump in my throat and a tear in my eye. It was a poignant moment.

EARlIeR that year, we’d lost my father-in-law Jim, who served as a flight engineer with Bomber Command during World War II. It was also the first remembrance event I’d attended since my own dad, Bill, a former radio operator with the Royal Navy, died two years before.

Sadly, it was to prove Jack’s last parade, too. he died the following month, aged 79. Jack served with ReMe, the Corps of Royal electrical and Mechanical engineers, in North Africa. like most men of his generation, he rarely spoke of his wartime escapades.

Apart from the official wreathlaying at the Centotaph in Whitehall, across the country hundreds of these low-key services and processions take place every year. Traditionally, they are held on the closest Sunday to the anniversary of the November 11 Armistice. This year that falls on Sunday the 14th.

It should be an occasion when the whole nation comes together to give thanks for the sacrifice of earlier generations. But in recent years, we’ve seen mission creep — a competition, almost, to establish who can be seen to stage the

earliest display of remembrance.

These days, it kicks off as early as mid-October. On Sunday, my wife found herself stuck in a traffic jam behind a remembrance parade in Barnet, North london.

Why? Remembrance Sunday wasn’t for another fortnight.

And when I say ‘kicks off’ I mean i t l i t e r a l l y. N e e d l e s s t o s a y, professional football — ever eager

to flaunt its bogus virtue — jumped the gun again. Across the country

at the weekend, Premier league clubs held a minute’s silence,

complete with statutory last Post bugler from the local barracks.

even the mascots have to get in on the act. Believe me, you’ve never seen anything more absurd than a man in a giant, fluffy chicken costume bowing his head

in the middle of a football pitch, one arm round the goalie. It doesn’t get much more dignified than that.

The sincerity of these ostentatious ‘tributes’ was immediately undermined when it was followed

by players and officials ‘taking the knee’ — a fatuous, divisive gesture in support of a statue-toppling Marxist rabble that wants to tear down the society Britain’s wartime generation fought to defend.

As the late John Junor, formerly of this parish, used to say: Pass the sick bag, Alice.

Call me old-fashioned, but I can’t ever recall, until recently, remembrance services taking place before Guy Fawkes Night on November 5.

Those who insist on wearing poppies and holding remembrance services from mid-October onwards are right up there with the crashing bores who drive round all year with Comic Relief red noses strapped to their car radiators.

Why do they have to make everything about them? The appropriate time to start wearing poppies is the first week in November.

That’s not to stop anyone buying them earlier, or making a generous donation to the Royal British legion. The more money raised for ex-servicemen and women, the better.

The right moment to observe the two-minute silence is at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of November, followed by a formal service on the nearest Sunday. Stretching things out over a month, in a orgy of ‘look at me, look how much I care’ exhibitionism devalues the solemnity of the occasion.

Aside from the headline event at the Cenotaph, nothing could be more fitting than the modest church parades in small towns and villages, such as we witnessed in Sonning all those years ago. I would imagine few, if any, of the ex-servicemen taking part that day are still with us.

But surely that is the way our Greatest Generation would wish to be remembered.