OVERLORD

I suppose that I ought to write about D-Day today, given that it is the sixth of June and seventy years to the day since the beginning of the Allied Invasion of Europe which, in time, led to the end of the Second World War, but I imagine that there are plenty of people writing mile after mile of copy about that today, all of whom are probably far more qualified to comment upon it than I am.

After all, even when I was a kid, "D-Day" meant little more to me than a few articles in a few comics and books talking about aeroplanes with "special" white-striped livery, and gliders, and operations with exciting sounding names like "Overlord", and beaches with code names like "Juno", "Gold" and "Omaha" and cards to collect and paste into our albums, and perhaps we never really understood what it all meant and how difficult it was to achieve and the sacrifices that were made in the pursuit of freedom from the yoke of tyranny, and that misty-eyed look that came into our parents and grandparents eyes whenever such things were mentioned.

Nowadays, of course, the Nostalgia game is big business and everyone in the media seems to be looking for an angle to make their programme or publication reflect those great big national events that suck us all in and give us some sense of pride in our homeland. Even dear old "Springwatch" managed to get in on the act this week by featuring an actually rather good item on the Poppy which, perhaps rather appropriately, seems to be blooming almost everywhere during this particular week.

In some ways it seems odd to mark the beginning of commemorations of the centenary of the outbreak of the First World war by marking a date which led to the end of the Second, but perhaps that is how it ought to be. After all, the slaughter of the so-called "War To End All Wars" led almost directly to the world-wide bloodshed of the Second, and much of the resolution of that conflict led to the fears of a Third which featured in so many of my generation's childhood nightmares.

War, it seems, and despite our very best efforts, is always with us. Perhaps it's a very human trait, or maybe it's even the most human one? Who really knows? All I know is that for every one of us striving to prevent one, there seems to be another who's just as eager to cause one, and sometimes it's those very efforts at prevention which seem to kick off the anger which causes these conflicts.

But that's not a discussion that we ought to be having today. Today we should just take a moment to remember those battles fought on this day seventy years ago, and all the days afterwards, and sink to our knees in gratitude that the people of that generation, some of whom perhaps now irritate us by getting in the way in the supermarket or in traffic, were prepared to stand up and say no, and risk everything they had in the fight against evil, so that we are able to have the freedoms and all of the other stuff that we enjoy and, perhaps, take just a little too much for granted these days.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

For everything.