Survivor

I know a lot of young people don't do this anymore but I still read newspapers and one surefire byproduct of doing so is that it gets my gander up every morning. There's always something, often a few things, that niggle or annoy.

I was reading today about the ceramic poppy display at The Tower of London, captured so well here by Kaybee and blipped by many here. It said in the Daily Telegraph (no I'm not a raving Tory, partly why I get so pissed off reading it, but I like the crossword) that over £1m had been raised for armed forces charities. So far so good.

But the flowers have been sold to members of the public - us - for £25 each. Since there will be 888,246 planted there by November 11 (one for each of the Commonwealth dead in WWI) a quick bash on my calculator says that total proceeds from the sale will top £22m.

A Daily Mail story said that about a third of the selling price would go to the charities (£8.75 a poppy) but more than £12 from each sale won't. Looking at comments on that story a lot of people think it's reasonable that a good slice of the costs should go to those who made the poppies. I could go along with that. While many charities depend heavily on donations of money and labour, virtually all of them involve a core of people who are paid for their work and expertise just as any job pays for work. That's understood.

But, of course, in any story of this kind there has to be the baddies and these are the financiers (who always seem to be shadowy figures in the background). The Mail outed one who it said could expect to earn "north of £1m" for his investment in the ceramics venture behind the poppy project.

I have no idea whether the poppies were this man's idea, but they have certainly captured people's imagination. Add to those donations the thousands of other pounds contributed to the economy by people travelling to see them (hotels, restaurants, travel, plus other discretionary spending) and I bet you could double the economic good it has provided for the UK. I don't know about the man's personal motivation - he has not commented on the story - but he did put up a wadge of cash (his risk) to make it happen and the money for his sleeping pills has to come from somewhere.

Thousands of people seem to be happy that it did happen and charities will benefit considerably (more titanium limbs for people whose sense of duty exceeded the questionable political judgement of those who sent them to war). That's the thing about economics and the money system. Once it starts grinding there is a lot of hidden benefit, just as there is hidden cost. But there's nothing much hidden about the the cost of war, not when you can see it as a life - birth pains, childhood, learning, love ambitions - in every flower.

After reading the Mail story I'm a little less vexed than I was over breakfast with the telegraph. Should the government give back the VAT? Oh, I don't know. There's far less waste in all of this than there is in bloody war. And it's got people talking, not only about WWI, but about contemporary reactions. The first comment on the telegraph story suggested the response had been "pathological".

Oh the picture part of blip? After all, it's usually the only thing anyone cares about. I've actually seen people here berating those who write underneath their images. Well you don't have to read it. Anyway I can't get enough of acers at this time of year as I'm reminding myself, looking back. Heavens, they even inspired a poem I'd forgotten. This one, at the front of our house, I did not dig up.

PS. I've just outlined a spooky challenge. I guess I'd better bone up on double-exposures!