A miserable grey day, as befits the date - in the eleventh hour of the eleventh day in the eleventh month we shall remember them. One of the reasons I can't bear to go to the towns' ceremony is that it makes me cry. The war monument is large and crowded with local names. You have to lack imagination to remain unmoved.
Took a coffee in the Cafe du Pont instead, where a couple of the old boys did a few chords from La Marseillaises.
The other reason I get upset is because of my familiarity of the poem In Parenthesis by the great painter/writer David Jones. Tempted to write out a chunk but that's not the job of the blog. Can't resist this little line though - after his fellow-warriors have been killed and Jones' himself lies wounded, he abandons his rifle, understood through his training to have been his wife and family ;
But leave it - under the oak.
Leave it for a Cook's tourist to the Devastated Areas and crawl
as far as you can and wait for the bearers.
He was always prescient! Tourism of the Devastated Areas is big business now.
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