The boy with a fish...

I almost missed it this morning, caught up as I was in my own thoughts and shopping for some ingredients to make flat breads. For a moment I thought that I had missed it, but checking my watch (which isn’t entirely reliable) against my phone, I realised that I had two minutes to go. I wasn’t keen on spending my two minutes, their two minutes, in a supermarket clinging onto a shopping trolley; so instead, I left my trolley empty and went outside to sit on the bench that was just around the corner.

The supermarket somehow seemed so disrespectful. But sat on my bench alone, cold and clear with light blue skies, a perfect eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, it seemed okay.

I have no idea why I remember. Perhaps it was the poetry I was forced to read at school – the Sassoon and Owen, the Rupert Brook… “and is there honey still for tea?” Or maybe it’s the two boys I knew at school who went off to become soldiers; one never to return. It could be Frank. It might even be those endless portrayals of the First World War on all those period dramas we all love to watch. Maybe, it’s just the building of the war memorials – in every village and every town across the land.

I seek them out sometimes, always surprised, occasionally amazed by the variety of their form; the boy with the fish in my old home town, the foreshortened Unknown Soldier on the harbour in Pwllheli.

It always seems to be about the First World War for me. The rest (I’m sorry to say) doesn’t really come in to it. The Second World War is close, but it seems far too jolly with all the beer and air raids and fighter pilots – of course I know that it wasn’t, but it’s those black and white films you see; David Niven and Dickie Attenborough, Mrs. Miniver, even ‘Allo ‘Allo. Oh, I know it's wrong, don't worry.

And all these new conflicts - we don't call them wars any more - brave... without doubt, heroes... many. But they are almost there through choice, particularly these days all these years in. They must know what they are getting into... they still give their lives though.

Yes, it's all those far too young men of The Great War - pulled from fields and schools with promises, fear, patriotism, then shoved into trenches and made to charge... that’s what I think of when I remember.

As I said - I don’t know why I remember, but whatever the reason, I’m glad that I do.