Thing To Do Today: remember.

The media here in England have been full of headlines asking people not to remember.

The trouble is that the crowds at the Tower of London to see the poppies have been so large that when I visited recently it took me twenty minutes just to shuffle the fifty or so yards from the Tube Station to the road that runs round the Tower.

Last weekend I'm told there was a one-way system in place even for pedestrians.

What poppies, you ask?

Well, today, which is Armistice Day, there are 888,246 ceramic poppies planted in the Tower of London's moat. Each poppy represents a British or Commonwealth person killed in military service during World War One. They form an artwork called Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red by ceramic artist Paul Cummins with setting by stage designer Tom Piper.

Each poppy represents a young life cut short.

Oh, and there are so many of them. So many.

'I had to come,' an old lady told me, 'because my uncle was killed. He was blown to pieces and they never found so much as a scrap of him.'

The poppies have all been bought by members of the public, at £25 each, raising millions of pounds for military charities.


Photo by JeyHan This picture was taken some time ago. Now the moat is completely filled with hundreds of thousands of red poppies.

People are determined to remember: and, you know something?  

It warms my heart.

Thing To Do Today: remember. This word comes from the Old French remembrer, from the Late Latin remormorārī , to recall to mind.