I observe the silence and my annual quid went into the tin. I'll think of great Uncle Jimmy, killed at nineteen a hundred years ago two thousand miles away from Salford and unburied still, and wonder if he ever knew what he was fighting for. Of course I never knew him, Teribus, but I do know that he was a fine young man whose death changed our family line forever in ways we can't know. I can just about cope with human-scale thinking of that kind. Human scale? Read the Teresa Hooley poem I posted on the Armistice Day thread (one of'em anyway). That's the way to think of wars if we we ever want to stop wars. In real life we can grieve over the tragedy of, say, a small child killed in a car crash. In an insane war a hundred people can be blown to kingdom come in a street market and it won't make the front page. Wars dull our thinking. Individual human experiences sharpen it, and we need sharper thinking. We don't stop wars (proven) by using remembrance, even if only in part, as a vehicle for patriotism, militarism and grandstanding by royalty. Those phenomena can have the other 364 days. That's wassup with me.