A Return

When we saw the poppies a few months ago it was early on and many people, us included, had little idea about what was going on. I was stunned by it all and went home and bought a poppy. Since then there has been so much publicity, so many photographs, so many blips. Now it's become renowned for the crowds wanting to see them, as much as for the poppies themselves.

We suddenly decided we would go down for the day and see them again. I think there was a sort of 'it will never happen again' feeling. So we went down to London on the train this morning, arrived in time for some lunch with our daughter, who had been at a meeting. And then we braved the crowds and there were crowds. However, with a bit of patience, it was possible to see all that one wanted to see, to take photographs and just ponder.

Breathtaking it is. Awesome in the real sense of the word. It's even stunning to see all the people there.

The installation has been criticised for, among other things, glamourising war, making it bland, pretty even. I disagree with this totally. It's true that it doesn't show the horror of what those represented by the poppies actually went through before they died. But it does show the horrific loss of life, the waste and futility of war, in a way no written account can do.

For me it's the way it brings it down from the global to the individual. Each poppy is a person, usually a young man, who was killed. But more than that, each death cast a shadow on the world in which they lived, For every man, there was a woman at home whose life was devastated - the grandmothers, mothers, sisters, wives, daughters, fiancées, girlfriends.

My great aunt was around 17/18 at the time and she used to say to me: "The young men were all gone." She never married. Never had children. Lived alone for the rest of her life.

Lives lost. Lives destroyed. It's happening all around us today. Numbers are terrible. When it's brought down to individuals, lots of individuals, that's the true horror of it all.