The Horsell's Mouth Politics, pedantry and personal interests

There have been so many eloquent thoughts expressed about Remembrance that it is difficult to add anything further.

But this year is the first ever year of Remembrance without a living First World War veteran in the UK. It is an almost impossible thought – so many soldiers of that generation died in 1915 and 1916 and are nearly 100 years gone. Others such as Harry Patch and Henry Allingham are still fresh in our minds, having lived a brace of years for which they knew they owed immeasurably to their long-gone friends.

Inevitably the focus now shifts to the Second World War and preserving the thoughts of those that fought in a conflict that was in some ways very similar and in others totally different to the Great War.

Thanks to them, two successive generations have been spared the ordeal that a war for survival brings to a nation. Those on the home front in the Second World War and fighting abroad lived in an environment where life became a great deal cheaper yet more valuable, where everyone lived for each moment, minute and day and where the prospect of death was never far away. People did things that they would never normally do, made sacrifices of staggering bravery and selflessness and the prosperity of the 1920s might as well have been the 1720s.

It’s a difficult situation to imagine and my generation is lucky to not have experienced it. We owe a debt of opportunity to past generations that we have been able to live our lives in a way that war meant none of them ever could. And to our forces who currently serve in Afghanistan and elsewhere, we owe a similar debt as they fight while our lives with the opportunity given to us by our grandparents proceed without the ordeal of war.

Two minutes is the very least each of us can spare.