TO REMEMBER IN YOUR PRAYERS

ONE OF THE MOST IMPRESSIVE aspects about London is the almost total lack of security and policing one encounters on the streets. It is difficult to imagine, as one flits from buying lingerie in Primark to olives in Selfridge’s, from socks in Gap to stockings in Zara, that one is permanently being stalked by a horde of terrorist-type people who wish us ill, as the present government of the United Kingdom would have us believe is the case. This was last week in London.

YET TODAY, ON THIS SUNDAY OF REMEMBERING, now back in Lisbon, we should not just remember those who have died in the conflicts great and small that have involved sacrifices made by my ancestors and yours – people who had no idea when they gave their lives that sometime in the future there would be “e-mail” and “blogs”, but who nevertheless died for this – but we should also remember another kind of “warrior leader” who also had these people believe they were being persecuted by a threat that did not exist.

WE SHOULD STAND UP as one to recall General Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, worse than Stalin in sacrificing the lives of millions of young men who had no idea of what was in for them in 1914. His absurd view of how to win World War One will no doubt see him rotting in Hell today.

WE SHOULD TAKE OFF OUR HATS to Winston Churchill, who knew perfectly well that he could draw up an easy agreement with Hitler in 1940 and avoid at least 5 million deaths on either side, but his political ambition was so great that he knew – and was right – that he would only be Prime Minister as long as the war lasted.

WE MIGHT ALSO REMEMBER in our prayers our present great leader, who lives up to the demands and requirements of all the above: sending young men and women to do nothing in Afghanistan other than get shot at and occasionally to shoot – when they have bullets – at others, so that he can warm his arse against the home fires of the rubbish burning on the streets of poppyfields back home.