Remembrance Sunday.

Today we have honoured all those down the years who have fought for our freedom.
This is an extract from my dad’s handwritten journal, which I discovered in the back of a drawer at his home, when I was helping him to clear out some old paperwork on one of my visits up North, after he had had another spell in hospital in 2007. Eventually he went into a Residential Care Home 18months later. As my sister had had a stroke in 2009, aged 56 years old and lived in Yorkshire, I made many journeys up the M6. And across the Pennines from 2008 until he died in 2010 aged 92. Mum died in 1990, aged 70.
He was stationed in London at the time working for the Army Pay Corps as a young man of 21.
The diary was 169 pages of a notebook and he documented the timings of each air raid, often having to negotiate falling flares, and near misses, walking home to his lodgings, which were looked after by a lovely couple Mr and Mrs Bourne who had taken him in with his mate.
They kept in touch with him and my mum, who came to visit from Lancashire when they got engaged. A friendship that went on in the years afterwards.
I had it privately published posthumously as he said I could do what I liked with it, only he never wanted to see it or hear it read to him.
In it’s pages a young man is revealed, proud to be British, who wanted to do his very best for his country.
He documented the Blitz until going over to France on D-Day with the East Lancashire Signals, landing at Arromanches.
I just want to honour all those who are missed, and those who still engage in fighting against injustice, on this day when we stand in silence for two minutes. As we observed today.