Camilla’s Remembrance Disservice

ANY advance on five minutes?

When the Spanish capital paused in 2005 for an official five-minute silence to mark the anniversary of the Madrid train bombs, it was hard not to be impressed. See if you can be silent in a crowd of people for five full minutes. And, no, you cannot put on your iPod, read or smoke a contemplative fag.

Grief makes no small demands on our lives. We must not forget. Although does anyone really believe the minds of silent Madrilenos did not wander from the matter in hand over five full minutes?

And while Jose thinks of the weekly shop and the clever retort he should have fired at his work colleague, the Express looks once more at poppies.

Earlier in the week, the paper was aghast and dismayed that Camilla Duchess of Cornwall had removed her poppy because it was chaffing her “Muslim scarf”.

In there eyes of one old war hero, this scarf became a headscarf and the removal of Camilla’s poppy was an affront to the many who have served this country and given their lives for our freedom.

And now the Express reports that Camilla has put her poppy back on. “NOW CAMILLA HIDES POPPY,” says the paper’s front-page headline.

For purposes of identification, the paper rings the plastic root of the poppy with a red circle. The rest of the flower is out of view beneath Camilla’s scarf. “She IS wearing one but you can’t see it under Muslim scarf,” says the paper.

Is she? Or isn’t she? Can there be harmony between the poppy and this “Islamic duppata scarf”?

“Should Camilla always wear her poppy with pride?” asks the Express, inviting its readers to respond via “No” and “Yes” phone numbers to the question that’s more loaded than George Bush at a frat house party.

But isn’t always wearing the poppy a bit extreme, even for Express readers? Today is November 2. It is not yet November 11, Remembrance Day, where many of us wear poppies with pride. On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month?

Meanwhile, the Mail looks at newsreader Huw Edwards, and notes that at the start of Monday’s Ten O’Clock news he was not wearing a poppy. But later in the broadcast he was.

Good for him. And good for the BBC. But when did Remembrance Day stretch to two weeks and become Remembrance Fortnight? And if it has gotten longer, shouldn’t the official period of silence be similarly extended from two minute’s to, say, six?

If it is, we can be the most silent of them all. When it comes to being silent and remembering, we will No.1.

Of course, what we will choose to remember is, for now at least, up to us. And after three minutes of quiet, our thoughts turn to the oven and whether or not we left it on…

Posted: 2nd, November 2006 | In: Tabloids Comment | TrackBack | Permalink