RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Remember, remember, it's the 11th of November…

RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Remember, remember, it’s the 11th of November… This mission creep of early ostentatious ‘tributes’ is just exhibitionism when the right moment to give thanks remains the 11th hour of the 11th day

The most moving Remembrance Sunday I can recall was back in November 1997.

We were having lunch with our friends Steve and Sussan at their home in the quintessentially English village of Sonning, Berkshire.

They lived in a small, thatched, terraced cottage on the main drag, if you can call it that. More of a country lane. 

It was the kind of place you’d expect to find Private Godfrey’s sister Dolly in the kitchen, baking another batch of her celebrated upside-down cakes.

Steve’s parents, Jack and Rose, were there, too. During pre-lunch Bloody Marys, we became aware of activity in the street outside. 

In recent years, we’ve seen mission creep — a competition, almost, to establish who can be seen to stage the earliest display of remembrance

These days, it kicks off as early as mid-October. On Sunday, my wife found herself stuck in a traffic jam behind a remembrance parade in Barnet, North London

The parish church, a couple of hundred yards away, had been staging a service of Remembrance, to honour the village’s war dead.

As we stepped out of the front door, a parade was assembling. 

Old soldiers, immaculate in regimental blazers and grey flannels, were joined by former WAAFS, WAACS, army cadets, sea scouts, cubs and guides, along with a smattering of young squaddies and members of the Territorial Army, based in nearby Reading.

Jack wasn’t in the best of health, but he stood ramrod straight alongside us as we watched in silence the parade passing. 

I’m not ashamed to say that I had a lump in my throat and a tear in my eye. It was a poignant moment.

Earlier that year, we’d lost my father-in-law Jim, who served as a flight engineer with Bomber Command during World War II. 

It was also the first remembrance event I’d attended since my own dad, Bill, a former radio operator with the Royal Navy, died two years before.

Sadly, it was to prove Jack’s last parade, too. He died the following month, aged 79.

And when I say ‘kicks off’ I mean it literally. Needless to say, professional football — ever eager to flaunt its bogus virtue — jumped the gun again

Jack served with REME, the Corps of Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, in North Africa. 

Like most men of his generation, he rarely spoke of his wartime escapades.

Apart from the official wreath-laying at the Centotaph in Whitehall, across the country hundreds of these low-key services and processions take place every year.

Traditionally, they are held on the closest Sunday to the anniversary of the November 11 Armistice. This year that falls on Sunday the 14th.

It should be an occasion when the whole nation comes together to give thanks for the sacrifice of earlier generations. 

But in recent years, we’ve seen mission creep — a competition, almost, to establish who can be seen to stage the earliest display of remembrance. 

These days, it kicks off as early as mid-October. On Sunday, my wife found herself stuck in a traffic jam behind a remembrance parade in Barnet, North London.

Why? Remembrance Sunday wasn’t for another fortnight.

And when I say ‘kicks off’ I mean it literally. Needless to say, professional football — ever eager to flaunt its bogus virtue — jumped the gun again. 

Across the country at the weekend, Premier League clubs held a minute’s silence, complete with statutory Last Post bugler from the local barracks.

Even the mascots have to get in on the act. Believe me, you’ve never seen anything more absurd than a man in a giant, fluffy chicken costume bowing his head in the middle of a football pitch, one arm round the goalie. It doesn’t get much more dignified than that.

The sincerity of these ostentatious ‘tributes’ was immediately undermined when it was followed by players and officials ‘taking the knee’ — a fatuous, divisive gesture in support of a statue-toppling Marxist rabble that wants to tear down the society Britain’s wartime generation fought to defend.

As the late John Junor, formerly of this parish, used to say: Pass the sick bag, Alice.

Call me old-fashioned, but I can’t ever recall, until recently, remembrance services taking place before Guy Fawkes Night on November 5.

Across the country at the weekend, Premier League clubs held a minute’s silence, complete with statutory Last Post bugler from the local barracks

The sincerity of these ostentatious ‘tributes’ was immediately undermined when it was followed by players and officials ‘taking the knee’ — a fatuous, divisive gesture in support of a statue-toppling Marxist rabble that wants to tear down the society Britain’s wartime generation fought to defend

Those who insist on wearing poppies and holding remembrance services from mid-October onwards are right up there with the crashing bores who drive round all year with Comic Relief red noses strapped to their car radiators.

Why do they have to make everything about them? The appropriate time to start wearing poppies is the first week in November.

That’s not to stop anyone buying them earlier, or making a generous donation to the Royal British Legion. The more money raised for ex-servicemen and women, the better.

The right moment to observe the two-minute silence is at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of November, followed by a formal service on the nearest Sunday.

Stretching things out over a month, in a orgy of ‘look at me, look how much I care’ exhibitionism devalues the solemnity of the occasion.

Aside from the headline event at the Cenotaph, nothing could be more fitting than the modest church parades in small towns and villages, such as we witnessed in Sonning all those years ago. 

I would imagine few, if any, of the ex-servicemen taking part that day are still with us.

But surely that is the way our Greatest Generation would wish to be remembered.

The clock is ticking, says Boris. It’s ‘one minute to midnight’ in the battle against climate change. Otherwise, we’re all doomed. Doomed, I tell you!

Oh, for heaven’s sake. Lay off the melodrama. We’ve heard it all before.

According to Prince Charles, it’s already well into the wee small hours, never mind a minute to midnight.

If we’d believed Cheerful Charlie, we should all have been burned to a crisp five years ago.

Boris’s colourful COP26 rhetoric sounds like a re-run of Tony Blair’s hysterical ‘24 hours to save the NHS’ nonsense — an ocean-going insult to our intelligence.

The clock is ticking, says Boris. It’s ‘one minute to midnight’ in the battle against climate change. Otherwise, we’re all doomed. Doomed, I tell you!

Expect more of this alarmist garbage over the next two weeks. The funniest thing I’ve read so far about the Glasgow bash was a report that 88,000 servings of ‘plant-based’ soup have been prepared for delegates.

That’s enough to blow a hole in the ozone layer the size of Hampden Park.

If we must stage a global warming beanfeast, wouldn’t it have made more sense to hold it at Wembley Stadium, like Live Aid, the Free Nelson Mandela concert and the Freddie Mercury Aids bash?

Boris could have roped in Bob Geldof, rounded up a few rock bands and asked Jerry Dammers, of The Specials, to update his Mandela anthem. Somehow, though, ‘FREEEE-EEEEE ROOF INSULATION!!’ doesn’t have the same ring to it.

You want fries with that? 

Despite denying it last week, the Government is making plans to tax meat and dairy. Environment minister George ‘Useless’ Eustice calls it a ‘carbon tax’ but it’s designed to stop us eating red meat and drinking milk.

He says it is needed to tackle climate change, the latest convenient excuse for picking our pockets.

So the Tories are not only determined to make us colder and poorer in pursuit of their political vanity project, they’re planning to force-feed us mung beans.

Meanwhile, Communist North Korea is going in the opposite direction.

To the horror of animal rights activists, the latest delicacy on the Little Rocket Man’s menu is roast black swan.

Black swan, eh? I bet nobody saw that coming.

Lewis Hamilton put on an elaborate disguise for a visit to a school. He looked the spitting image of Liverpool FC’s German manager Jurgen Klopp.

Hang on a minute. We’re told it’s a racist hate crime for white actors and Morris Men to wear blackface, for white students to don Mexican sombreros and white women to plait their hair into cornrows.

So why is it OK for a mixed-race Formula One driver, and prominent supporter of Black Lives Matter, to culturally appropriate a Teutonic adopted Scouser? Cancel him!


So why is it OK for a mixed-race Formula One driver, and prominent supporter of Black Lives Matter, to culturally appropriate a Teutonic adopted Scouser? Cancel him!

The idiocy of last week’s punishment Budget is still sinking in. Taxing wine on the basis of ABV strength, so that claret costs more than Pinot

Grigio, is plain perverse.

Still, what else should we expect from a teetotal chancellor? Rishi boasts that he has merely carried out a long-overdue ‘simplification’ of alcohol duties. 

Never mind duty on booze, he’d have been better employed simplifying Britain’s hideously complicated tax code, which now runs to around 18,000 pages, containing upwards of ten million words. We’d all drink to that.

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