Red and White

There's been quite a lot of discussion online about wearing poppies, not wearing poppies and pressure to wear (or not wear) poppies. Here is a link to one interesting piece on the BBC website. The reasons for not wearing include some war veterans who feel that the original reasons for remembering the war dead have been lost in a kind of glorification of later, less justified wars. In my younger days I only ever wore a white poppy. Now I tend to wear a red one, sometimes both, because I want to remember my family members and others who lost their lives or were injured mentally or physically by the 1914-1918 war. It should always be a personal choice, not social pressure, that leads someone to choose to wear a poppy. It is to preserve precisely that freedom that our forebears died.This Wednesday I will be remembering especially my husband's great-grandfather, Andrew Riddell, who died at Gallipoli in July 1915.