Head Space Daily Words...

When I was at school I remember one year, everyone buying poppies, then painting them white with Tipp Ex as an expression of peace and an anti-war sentiment. It’s the sort of thing teenagers do, or we did back then. At least we were buying poppies and remembering. I buy my poppy every year and I generally like to do it a couple of weeks out, rather than in the week running up to it. This year I didn’t do that, because I couldn’t find anywhere that was selling poppies on my way to work. Normally, there is someone at my local train station – not this year. There was no one selling them at Shadwell Station, or any of the shops in the area of Docklands that I was working at the time. Last weekend I was in our local supermarket and noticed a box of poppies on the floor behind the cash registers and had to ask one of the shop assistants to pass me one over. She put my money into the poppy box, as there was no collection tin. This week – and it may just be me – but I haven’t seen as many people wearing poppies as I usually do. We can’t get apathetic about this. No matter what your view is about war, the fact that hundreds of thousands of British soldiers blindly lost their lives, in the two World Wars, cannot be forgotten. Not to mention the millions of civilian casualties throughout the world and unimaginable atrocities of genocide. If these soldiers hadn’t fought on our behalves, we would have been in the grip of Nazism. Britain would be a very different place. I would rather see people wearing poppies painted white with Tipp Ex than no poppy at all. It is not a show of apathy but rememberance in a different way…