Gone but not yet forgotten

The need to find a Blip on these cold miserable office days has made me pay just a little bit more attention to my surroundings. Most days we'll walk the pooch round the local lanes & fields & end up passing through the churchyard usually on our way to the village store. As we did so a few days ago I noticed the sign that has emerged from some freshly trimmed bushes - telling locals that the church gates are a gift in memoriam of those who fell in the Great War.
We buried my Grandfather late last year, and for a while now I've been conscious that mine is the last generation that will have a living link to the World Wars. My grandfather never really liked to talk much about the war when I was growing up - but in latter years, perhaps realising that our generation needed to know, he would share stories - not just of the horrors and the fears - but of the camaraderie and the everyday heroism that people , in the worst of times, found the norm. He was 16 when he joined the RAF - something I found shocking when I worked it out - but that I later learnt was not only an everyday occurrence, but was expected of him.
For most people today these connections if not already gone, will be gone in a decade. I can't believe that we'll forget, but I do think we should do more to remember. For a long while I've thought that making the Monday after Remembrance Day a Bank Holiday, a national day of reflection, would go some way towards achieving that.