Once a year, a lot of people in the UK wear red paper poppies to remember those who died in war – initially in the First World War after the millions of poppies that grew each summer amid the mud of the Flanders battlefields seemed to evoke the spirits of those killed there.
Most of us with military service feel like we could – and maybe should – wear a poppy every day. Only someone somewhere decided that you had to stop wearing them on some date that I couldn’t care less about.
So some of us don’t wear poppies at all – or we forget, – to wear a poppy that is… We remember (even though also trying to forget).
But for us, the remembering is nothing to do with paper poppies; until of course somebody says “Where’s your poppy?”
So I’ve had a go at writing a song about what it’s really all about, and how even people like me and my comrades don’t truly know. (And cut me some slack on the crumpled, “incorrectly worn” or missing poppy please.)