Travelled on a packed London Bus to the local Stn over weekend - was the only one wearing a poppy! Then on a packed District Line Tube carriage to Blackfriars - only saw 2 people wearing one! Local Remembrance Service Sunday - approx. 80% of spectators not wearing one. I know London has a very high non British population now & sales are declining, but I was really shocked & saddened this year.
I went to Sussex for the weekend and saw more boys in skirts and man buns than people wearing poppies. On the way home I went to the service on Southsea, Common Portsmouth where everything was done properly, but Sussex was terrible with a complete lack of respect in Lewes, Eastbourne, Brighton and Hove.
Most people i saw at the weekend sported a poppy, noticed a lot of metal poppies this year, in Blackpool all the trams and buses had poppies on the front or displayed in view through the front window. Destination boards also reflected at times Least We Forget between their normal route displays Lamposts also had large poppies attached in some areas, and one the Lest We Forget benches from last year
A popular, longtime hockey broadcaster in Canada was fired on Monday for making the same observations. ‘I MEANT IT’: Don Cherry fired over controversial poppy comment
I suspect that a lot of people's poppies have dropped out and been lost because of those 'orrible plastic stems
As I travelled up to Central London on Sunday morning (very early 6.30am), people were very interested in my badges (King's Regiment White Horse of Hanover and Far East POW ceramic with Poppy) and asked me what they stood for. In the tube carriage This made me look around and I would say that 50% of the commuters were wearing a Poppy.
At 6.30am I'm pretty sure everyone in the carriage was going to work Chris, the Polish couple who chatted to me certainly were.
I can remember in the 80s working on a critical proposal until the dawn of a Sunday in order to meet a bidding deadline and then stretching my legs around Blackfriars. There were certainly people around but it was a sort of alternative magical London - the sort of place Neil Gaiman or Ben Aaronovitch would write about. Mind you that might have been the effect of 48 hours working without sleep.
I don't go up town very much these days, but as you say at that time it has a different vibe. I walked from Charing Cross tube to Canada House across the top of Trafalgar Square and there was nobody in sight at all. Imagine doing that at 10.00am.
I remember visiting London in 1969 with my parents and a BBC radio reporter asking me, aged five, if I knew what the poppy was and what it stood for. I told them and they were impressed, saying as much to my father. He simply replied it would have been disgraceful if I had not known. My eldest daughter, now in her early thirties never wears one as she is resentful of the time I spent away when she was young. That's fine, we don't see each other for a couple of weeks around November 11th, she knows my feelings and she knows that she is wrong. My younger daughter does and my son is in the army himself now so of course he does. But if I don't see the poppy, I don't see the person. That is my choice.
I travel London a lot in and out of rush hour and you really don't see many people wearing Poppies during the Remembrance period. Their choice either deliberate or unaware its as simple as that. I am sure plenty of people donate and don't wear and others don't donate and don't care
Not available from the poppy sellers round here and trying to push that pin through a plastic stalk can result in shedding blood
Just maybe most of them are on Facebook and after three weeks of tacky frames and sentimentalised photos accompanied by "They dyed fur are freadoms" captions, people have had enough of it. The whole remembrance thing (it's now an industry) seems to have lost a lot of its dignity to me.
I'm genuinely perplexed why it is felt by some that if you're not wearing a poppy, you do not reflect on the humanity and memory of millions of men and women who lost their lives during World War...my personal view is that it's a personal decision whether to wear and a personal decision when/where/how to reflect.
