Why you should wear your poppy.

It’s been a long evening. The sort of evening that you have as a parent where it seems that every ten minutes either I or the DH are running up the stairs to sort out a crying child. It’s exhausting because, apart from the physical exertion of ‘step class’, you can’t do anything. You can’t spend time together watching Grand Designs. You can’t catch up on each other’s days. You can’t talk excitedly about your new business idea. You can’t pack up the box of too-small baby clothes to take to the Women’s Refuge. Conversations hang in the air, mingling with anger, frustration, resentment.

As I came back downstairs after my latest parental 20 metre dash, I took my coat (still hanging on the bannister where I left it after finishing the school run) to hang up and stabbed my finger on a pin. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have a pin in my coat, but this one holds my poppy in place. And as I looked at the red blood on my finger, and the red poppy on my coat, the resentment and frustration and anger and tiredness were forgotten.

I am proud to say that I come from an Army background. Both my mother and father served in the Armed Forces, as did my Grandfathers before them. I made a rather poor job of serving in the CCF at school. I didn’t really like the mud and the wet and the cold.

There are men and women, however, who choose to go to work in the mud and wet and cold. They choose to work in dust and heat. They choose to work in areas of conflict. They choose to protect  the life that I have: the votes I cast in elections, the children I have had in modern hospitals, the education I received, the blog that I write, the husband that I married. I have been able to choose to do all of these things because of those men and women, and the men and women who went before. Because they choose to protect my way of life, they are sent into harm’s way in the mud and the rain and the heat and the dust.

So before you start talking about whether we should be at war, be involved in a war, remember that whilst your job may require you to travel to Slough for a conference or Wales for a Team Bonding exercise, other people get sent to Iraq and Afghanistan because their job requires it. They leave their families and go into a warzone to protect your right to protest against that war. They try to protect you from getting blown up in a plane, or on a bus going to the job that you complain about.

I wear my poppy out of respect for those men and women. I wear it out of respect for the families that they leave behind: the families who have to carry on daily life for months, fearing every day that they will get the phone call telling them that their loved one won’t be coming home. I wear it for the men and women who went before them, for the men and women who will follow after them. I wear it for the people of Wootton Bassett, who honour every single fallen soldier. I wear it out of gratitude for the life that I have.