Remembrance Sunday

I went into town this morning for the Remembrance Sunday service at the war memorial. The town has a good turnout for the half hour service, there must have been at least two hundred in the crowd and another hundred taking part - see Extra. The road through the town centre is closed and most shops stay shut. The sun even made an appearance until the service itself started. I realised this morning that it's ten years since I went to the Tower of London with three friends for an afternoon volunteering making up the ceramic poppies and planting them in the moat. It was impossible not to think of the lost life represented by the poppy you were constructing. Then planting it, you looked at the broader scene of just so many poppies, so many young lives lost. There were 888,246 poppies in total, representing the British or Colonial servicemen killed in WWI. I've added a couple of photos taken of the poppies, one in the moat where we were planting showing one amongst the many, the other when we'd finished of the patch we'd been working on with all the other volunteers. This afternoon I did a bit more tidying up in the garden for an hour, it was a bit chilly!