I SHALL be celebrating the Great War next year as much as I would be celebrating the Great Plague.
It's one of these things you read about and think: "They've gone too far this time." But nothing is too far now.
No-one put pressure on the British Government to hold this blood-themed party. It's another wheeze from its own clotted brain. Celebrate Britain. Put out more Union flags.
War. Dreadful thing. Never again. Say the same sort of people who start wars.
Some say next year's commemoration is a cunning plan to spike the guns of the nasty Nats. That's not the motive, but it's a knowingly-anticipated by-product.
Still, it's 100 years, after all, and so must merit something, given the peculiar significance you Earthlings place on zeros.
Look at Bannockburn. That'll be 700 years next year. This could get dirty. And, knowing Better Together, that means it will.
Wonder how they'll heat up the "proud Scot" chestnut then? Their instinct will be more for the Great War, but perhaps they'll make a calculating point of posing with Saltires for Bannockburn too.
I won't. I think it's right to mark it in some way. Perhaps with a collection of essays. But I'm uncomfortable with it being an England v Scotland thing. I hope it's muted, dignified and generous.
Whereas I hope the Great War parade gets rained on and that the stage collapses. I distrust people who make an obsession of publicly commemorating the First World War. I'm sorry. They're just people I've learned to avoid.
In my experience, they're an unholy collection of sectarian oddballs and sinister British nationalists.
Two of the most weird and chilling people I ever met were a pair of Ulster Unionists who, for some reason, turned up in a Leith Walk bar.
I met their ilk a second time, in a bar in Omagh. This second two didn't mention war memorials but seemed similarly distant, inhabiting a psychically deranged parallel universe that reeked somehow of evil.
One of them said he'd lost a relative in that town's own particular tragedy. To that extent, one surely sympathises and sees good cause for psychological scarring, while reporting honestly the real, gut feeling that there was something chilling about them both. The other two, in that Leith bar, were on holiday. One repeatedly referred to me in a marked manner as "Rab-ah". Devilish, d'you see?
OK, I don't want to overdo the satanic shtick, but what sort of person comments repeatedly on the lack of war memorials encountered on their un-jolly journey from Ulster to Embra? In Scotland, land of cake and war memorials?
I agree that memorials have a function. If visiting a village on holiday, the plinth with heroic statue reminds you not to forget.
Already I take time every November, usually alone in the house, to reflect on the Not Very Good War. I reflect on it at other times as well.
It's because I think that, had I been born 60 years earlier, I might well have died in it. As so many young men did.
It's the con that gets me. The fact that I'd have been duped. The many patriotic publications with stirring illustrations of semi-naked Britannia waving Union flags in battle didn't mention the mud, rats, innards and aural hell. The Captain Darlings devising this fantasy didn't say you'd be ordered straight into machine guns to gain a stretch of ground that, as Blackadder put it, could be covered "by an asthmatic ant with some heavy shopping". They didn't mention it was insane.
That's why I support the Jimmy Reid Foundation's campaign to remember these brave souls who opposed the insanity.
Next year, the British Establishment, backed by its peculiar footsoldiers in Scotland, is planning to go over the top.
Well, let's fix bayonets and jab them up the butt to see if we can prick their consciences about how their desperate desire to strut upon the world stage can lead to disaster.
And, while we're at it, let's give decent visitors from Northern Ireland, Unionist or otherwise, a chance to admire our memorials to those who opposed the jingoistic madness.
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