I’ve just been setting the fire in order to create a snug Friday evening at home. Actually all evenings are at home, but there’s still a vestige of that Friday evening feeling that requires particular snugness. The newspaper I was crumpling up was from last January and presented a different world, a world of bargain ski holidays, winter sunshine travel and forward looking to summer vacations. Sadly the readers who booked those holidays were shortly to be claiming refunds and frantically phoning their insurance companies. We seem to be a society who can never fully understand our pasts and can never take control of our futures.
This is seeringly obvious at the moment as we all wonder how we can plan Christmas. We don’t like unknowns and don’t trust those who say they know. So will we construct our plans on the premise of lockdown finished on December 2nd, or will we have plans B and C or no plans at all? I suspect lots of brains are curdling at attempts to navigate all the possibilities and probabilities, let alone the prospect of being launched into the black vacuum of circumstances beyond imagining, like the circumstances never imagined by those Observer readers back in January.
Many people from this community are engaged in all manner of inventiveness to find ways of acknowledging the festivals that could so easily sink out of our normal rhythms. Our lives without these festivals would be monochrome and stagnant. It is unthinkable that we should be so obsessed with our own deprivations that we simply switch to Netflix and forget the deprivations and sacrifices of Remembrance Day. With this is mind, at the initiative of Alan Richmond, today I went up to the war memorial to pay my own homage to my most treasured casualty of WW1, T.Leafe, whose name always makes me smile when read out at the Remembrance Service. Alan was also sound man, effects, first gripper, make-up, editor, catering, music dubber, stunts organiser and he even animated me. We also filmed the poem about Dorothy Travis Walker of the RAF, killed at the end of WW2. Alan’s plan is to release these films to enable our community to remember the Fallen.
There was a grey mantle of fog this morning but there was also a muted glow where the sun was rising. By the time Alan and I went to the grave yard it was a morning of tingling light with just enough hazy residue to soften the headstones and distant Crich Stand. Red ribbons are hanging in the yew tree beside the war memorial. There will be no bugles or banners this year, just single individuals visiting and placing wreathes. Maybe at Christmas too there will be little show, but in the dark and silence, there will always be those who will find a way to light a candle and hum a carol.
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