I’m not good at silence. There. I’ve said it.
I’m the person who fills a pause with a comment about the weather, or the kettle, or whether anyone else thinks it’s gone a bit chilly in here. Or if anybody wants a biscuit
So Remembrance Day always catches me out a little. Two minutes. No chat. No fiddling with my sleeve. Just standing still and letting the quiet do its thing.
It’s Wednesday, 11 November, and I’ve been thinking about it all morning.
The photograph I’ve picked for today isn’t a poppy field in the grand sense. Nobody’s going to put it on a tea towel. It’s a vineyard, the old vines cut back and gnarled and still bare, standing in rows like a lot of small dark hands held up. There’s grass between them, and stones, and a house with a pink-orange roof tucked in among the trees at the back.
And then, right at the front, two poppies.
Just two. Red as anything, a bit wobbly on their stems, growing in the long grass as if they’d turned up to the wrong party and decided to stay anyway.
I love them for that.
I love that the whole scene is soft and green and grey and muted, and these two have simply refused to blend in. It’s the sort of thing I notice when I’m out with the camera. Not the big view. The small red thing at the edge of it.
I don’t think I saw them properly when I took it. I think I saw the vines. It was only when the scan came back that I thought, oh. There you are.
Funny how that works.
The poppies were always going to be the point.
So, the two minutes.
I’ve never known what to do with my head during them. Some years I think of the big things, the history, the names on the war memorial in the village, the wreaths gone slightly soggy by the afternoon. Some years I think about whether I’ve left the oven on.
I’m being honest, because that’s the deal here.
This year I think I’ll think about Dad.
Not in a heavy way. He wouldn’t have wanted that. He’d have raised an eyebrow and told me to stop making a fuss and put the kettle on.
But I’d like to stand there and just have him with me for a bit. Quietly. No commentary.
Grief is odd. It doesn’t arrive on the big days the way you expect. It sort of loiters. It sits down next to you in the car, or in the biscuit aisle, or halfway through a perfectly ordinary Tuesday.
And then sometimes a day comes along that has a built-in pause, and you think, well, that’s handy. Somewhere to put it.
Two minutes.
That’s all it asks.
My dad always said I had a book in me and should keep on writing so when I think I should resurrect blogging and sharing more again it is his voice I hear. He would often read this blog, leave a comment, nudge me to bring back Ranty Friday as he loved when I got animated and cross about something.
Bruce, for the record, is much better at the silence than I am. He just stands there, hands folded, looking at some middle distance I can’t see. I stand next to him trying very hard not to shuffle. I fail, usually. A tiny shuffle. A small cough.
He pretends not to notice. That’s love, that is.
I think what I like about a quiet day like this one is that it doesn’t ask me to be anything. Not cheerful, not profound, not brave. I can just be a woman in a coat, in November, holding a small red paper poppy that’s already trying to fall off its pin.
Has anyone ever worn one all the way through without losing it?
I haven’t. I lose at least two a year. I buy a third and feel faintly guilty, as if I’ve let the side down.
The ones in the photo have no such problem. They’re rooted. They’ve got the whole field to hold them up, and a vineyard behind them, and a bit of weather coming in.
They’ll stay put.
I think that’s what I want from the day, really. To stay put for a moment. To be rooted, even briefly, in the fact that other people stood in far harder places than a village green, so that I could stand here fretting about a shuffle.
That’s quite a lot to hold in two minutes.
So I’ll try.
I’ll stand still. I’ll think of Dad, and the names on the memorial, and the people who didn’t come home, and the ones who did and never quite said.
I’ll try not to cough.
And afterwards I’ll go home and put the kettle on, because that is what he would have told me to do.
Two poppies. Two minutes. One slightly fidgety woman.
It’ll do.