I’m not a great fan of the Royal British Legion’s “Poppy Drive”; I grew up with it, and I understand it, and my father served in World War 2 so I understand where it comes from and I respect why and that my dad was justifiably a huge supporter of it.

But I don’t like it nowadays. I don’t like the modern, performative aspects — that people in my local village Facebook group are complaining that there are “not enough poppies” in the village, compared to others locally.

Those — by the way — have long drapes of fabric, drangled with fake red flowers, literally hanging from major lampposts into the town. Apparently some call this “poppy shagging”.

I would like to propose a better way to remember the sacrifices of our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents:

1. Buy a Eurostar ticket; get to Calais or Brussels, and then (backtracking if necessary) travel to Ypres / Ieper; book a hotel in the area.
2. Next morning, ideally a cold, wet, grey day, ideally in winter, visit the Menin Gate, pick a wall at random, and start reading the names aloud.
3. Keep reading names aloud; consider each one of them as a friend of yours.
4. Keep going until you are hungry and sick, and then keep going further.
5. Don’t stop. You’re not allowed to stop until you drop.
6. There are more than 54,000 names on the Menin Gate so at one name every 5 seconds this will take you a little more than 75 hours, if you can last that long. You probably can’t.
7. Next: get a taxi or get someone to drive you to Tyne Cot Cemetery. Spoiler: this one is the largest. There are nearly 12,000 more buried here, and over 8,000 graves have no name. Walk around, and remember that each gravestone was a once human being, and perhaps a friend of yours.
8. Now you may weep, if you haven’t started already.
9. Next go visit another one, perhaps Cabaret Rouge. Notice the big white monument in the middle. Cry some more.
10. Drive around the area. Use the back roads. Take note how many more of those monuments you see, in small fields which suddenly turn out to be graveyards. You will see lots. And you will be blasted by cold, wet winds, as you walk around each. And you haven’t even been to Italy yet.

Then: go home, all the way home, and ponder whether the more important thing is:

a) whether your village/clothes are decked-out in sufficient number of red paper and plastic baubles, or:

b) for you to find something constructive to do for humanity, to help ensure that we never inflict such stupid, wasteful, wicked divisiveness upon each other, again.