A history student, four lost poppies, and a lesson in knowing when to stay quiet.
CAMBRIDGE, England – It is a quiet week in the library and I have lost another poppy. That makes four since the start of the appeal, which I am told is not a record but is, by the standards of the people who sit near me, a fairly committed attempt. I buy them in good faith, I pin them on in the morning, and by lunchtime the pin has abandoned the flower and gone to live in a sleeve.
Morning: Pins, Coats and Honest Mistakes
The Royal British Legion has launched its 2026 appeal, and according to LBC’s guide to Remembrance Sunday and poppies, it is aiming to raise more than 50 million pounds to support current and former service personnel and their families. I am in favour of this, and I am also in favour of not leaving the poppy in the pocket of the coat that goes in the wash.
LBC adds that poppies are worn in the lead-up to and on Remembrance Day, which this year falls on a Wednesday, and that it is not a bank holiday. The two-minute silence on Sunday is at 11am, and the national service is at the Cenotaph on Whitehall, where the public can watch from the pavements without tickets, although entry may be limited. I have written all of this on the back of my hand, since I will not be trusting a poppy to remind me.
The same guide notes that artificial poppies have been sold in Britain since 1921. I have just noticed that is a century of people pinning a flower to a coat and then spending the afternoon patting themselves down. We are an old and continuous tradition of looking for something that was there a minute ago.
Late Morning: The Archive
This week Dr Pemberton-Hale sent us to a small college archive to look at a bundle of letters from the First World War, and I would like to speak plainly about it, because it was not funny. A box of letters on grey paper, in the cramped handwriting of people who did not expect anyone to read them a century on. The archivist, Mr Hollis, handed me a pair of cotton gloves and said “gently”, and I have not been so gentle with anything since.
There is a way of reading old letters in which you try to find the joke, because that is what I do for a living, and a way in which you stop. I stopped. One of them was about socks. It was entirely about socks, and the sentence at the end of it was about nothing at all, and that was the one that stayed with me for the rest of the day.
Mr Hollis let me sit with it for as long as I liked. I did not take a photo. It did not seem like something you should have in your pocket.
The Kite Stays Home
I had planned to fly my kite on Sunday morning on the common. The wind forecast was good, a steady breeze from the south west. Then I read the timing of the silence and decided that no one wants a stranger with a kite on the horizon at 11am. Kite and string are staying in the hall. I will walk instead, in my coat, with a poppy I have checked three times.
It is a small decision. The best ones are.
Afternoon: The Group Chat Gets Sentimental
The flat group chat, usually a stream of photographs of chips, went quiet when I posted a picture of the poppy tin on the library desk. Marguerite said she had worn hers since the start of the month and was proud of it. Fenwick said he had lost his twice and had been quietly buying a third, and then a fourth, and then a small box of them, which he keeps in his bedroom drawer “for emergencies”.
Tobes wrote “good lad”, then deleted it, then wrote it again. That is the most emotionally literate thing he has done this term.
Evening: A Quiz, A Regret, A Plate Of Chips
The pub quiz team, the Footnotes, met at a quiet pub in town where the quizmaster is a retired geography teacher who insists on a moment of reflection before the first round. It was a good moment. Nobody coughed.
Later, in the second round, a question about the Cenotaph made all of us sit up, and someone at the next table helped us with a word we could not recall. Then, for reasons I cannot explain, the chat turned to regrets, and I mentioned a headline I had read on farm.fm, where farmers admit marriage regrets they cannot afford to act on. I only wanted to say that everyone has something they cannot undo. It came out as a worse remark than I had intended and Fenwick, to his credit, pretended to cough.
We ended the evening where we always end it, at the chip shop, eating from paper in the cold. We did not say very much.
The Week Ahead
The London Prat is not usually the place for a sombre entry, and my editors would no doubt prefer more kite. But a good satirist knows what the room needs, and the difference between that and the other sort is set out in this introduction to a proper British humour website. Sometimes the right line is the one you leave out.
For the wider view of what the network publishes day to day, there is English news as the network reports it. For the poppy appeal itself, Forces News on the 2026 appeal and the sacrifices of the armed forces is the better read than anything I can write.
On Sunday I will be in my coat at eleven. I will have my poppy, my pin, and my hand with the writing on it. If you want to know how the week goes, you can find more of my daily notes at The London Prat. The kite will be in the hall, quiet, with its string wound neatly. It has been told.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/