Remembrance Day for us is a national rather than a personal matter. Obviously those who have lost friends and family recently will be thinking of them but for most of us the family members we 'remember' died over a hundred years ago and we would not have known them even if they had survived.

It would seem that after the awful carnage of the First World War when so many that died were buried where they fell, or were never even identified, it was felt that the least we could do was to see that they were not forgotten. Almost every village in England has its war memorial and the number of dead for the 1914-18 war vastly outnumber those of 1939-45.

Should we ever have a hundred years of peace maybe the commemoration will fade away but currently we are still adding to the lists and the collective conscience gets jolted at too-frequent intervals.