November sunrise

Everyday I wake up at 7.10am, as the day's are getting shorter it's getting darker and darker in the mornings. this morning I awoke to this.


There are some advantages to being up early, if I wasn't up I'd never have seen such a beautiful sunrise, the picture really doesn't do it justice.

We will remember them...

On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month the guns stopped firing.


Sounds such an innocent statement doesn't it? But at that point in time the carnage of the First World War finally stopped. In total between 20 and 40 million people died (according to Wikipedia), this is soldiers, and civilians from both sides. A whole generation was wiped out. This was the first of the "modern wars" and was all the more brutal for it, it led to the invention of all sorts of wonderful things, but cost millions of lives. at the time it was thought that it was the wars to end all wars, and never again would families live in fear of letter and telegrams.
In hindsight we know this isn't true, many more people have died in wars, that's why at 11.00 today we need to remember, not just the soldiers who fought in a war 90 years ago, but those who have fought in every conflict ever since.

(In case you're wondering why the poppy? After the carnage of the First World War over the fields of Flanders ended the first thing to start re-growing were poppies. )