1 July
We are
now on the downwards slope towards Crimble and the New Year … of dear …
So what
on earth can I say about the remembrance service going on in France right now?
So much has been written in the past that all that is left is how the Somme affected
my family. The only two involved there that I know about are both my granddads.
I never met granddad Clark, he died in 1945 I think. My dad didn’t say much
about him other him being gassed at some point. I’ve since found out that he
was in the Machine Gun Corps and he came home with three medals, but I can’t
remember what they are.
Grandad
Jayne I did know, but you know what? He didn’t a lot about that war at all. He
was in the Royal Horse Artillery, and was another man who suffered because of
the gas attacks. I do remember one story he told me though. He was leading a
horse down a lane when a shell landed just behind him and exploded. He was
thrown a good distance, but there was nothing left of the horse. Granddad was
able to get up and walk pretty much straight away, only to find that he had a
small length of the leather lead-line off the horse still in his hand, and he
still had it and showed it to me. And that is really all I know about WW1,
apart from what I’ve read over the years.
There
aren’t that many ex-soldiers who will voluntary talk about what of their experiences
during the fighting. However, there have been a large number of men who have
told their stories, and we should be thankful to them for doing so. It is far
too easy to lose the history of the common people over the years. For a long time,
historians have only been interested in the lives of the people at the top of
society, the shakers and movers. Common people only become subjects when they
do something which impacts on the top end of society. Now we are much more
interested in the lives of all the people, not just the top end of society, and
if that draws cries of moving into social history, then tough luck, it’s what I
like.
Yesterday
I sat trying to catch-up on recorded my recorded shows off telly, and the first
one I went for was Jet! When Britain
Ruled the Sky. One clip they showed was of the P1127 flying backwards with
an escort of forward flying helicopters. I remembered watching that on the news
or on one the BBC shows covering Farnborough Air Show when that clip was shot.
And it was at that point that I decided that I wanted to fly one of those magic
airplanes. It was all I dreamed and talked about for ages after seeing, no
wonder friends got fed-up with it. Then I had to see a careers advisor at
school and he told me I had no chance of joining the RAF because of my poor eye
sight.
Talk
about ‘crash and burn’; I was devastated, and felt really insulted when he told
me all I was really suited for was being a farm hand. He soon got short shrift
from both mam and me. Dreams dashed though, ah well, I could still dream off it
anyway, even if they were now real dreams, and not hopes for the future … I did
later fly with the RAF of course, but as a passenger, not as a pilot. But I
still once have control of a helicopter, even if for only 20 seconds and the
pilot still kept his hands on the main controls – good fun too.
I wonder,
do you know any unsophisticated people? There is a reason for this question
which I’ll come to later, but really, how do you determine someone is unsophisticated;
what is it that makes you come to that decision? For me, I think we are all
sophisticated to some degree anyway and the making of that statement is very
judgemental. So, there I was last night reading King and Maxwell by David Baldacci when I read the words, ‘…
unsophisticated and therefore uninteresting …’ As it is written within the
story, it is very much a judgement statement about the bad guys they are
investigating. It’s another good one from this author.
Today’s
photo …
A male giraffe. There was a huge lamp post that I had shoot through to get this shoot, that's why there so little of him in the shot.
Today
funny …
A guy in a restaurant says to the waitress "I want a cup of
coffee without cream." The waitress comes back a few minutes later and
says "I'm sorry, but we're all out of cream. Would you mind taking your
coffee without milk?"
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