Geriatric OE

The weekly musing of a couple of Kiwis on their geriatric OE in The UK






Saturday, 12 January 2013

Staying in...


Very cold day today temperature only just reached 4 degrees. Plan A has gone out the window, plan B was to stay indoors. We did venture out briefly to the supermarket and it was soooo nice to get back to our warm little flat afterwards.  
The other day on QI, a comedy panel game, Alan Davis described an interesting book he had read. Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks.
I borrowed it from our local library today. The republished book has a new introduction written by the author himself.  

He writes bout he had been thinking about WWI since…

 ‘the day when as a schoolboy of twelve he was asked to read out at assembly on November 11 the names of the old boys form his school who had died in the two world wars. It was a tiny school, but the list was so long that I was excused lessons the next day with a sore throat”

He then goes on to write about how he felt that …

the war had somehow slipped from public understanding”
“Then only 20 years later a second frenzy had convulsed the world, one aspect of which had been so well memorialised at the insistence of its victims that seemed to leave no room in the public memory for earlier holocausts”

 He was, I think referring to the killings of thousands of Jews.
WWII is still very much in the minds of the people on this side of the world. War documentaries are screened regularly here. Not as many as WWI, but they are there. 


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