Remembrance

11th November 2022

Another week passes. Autumn seems to be with us, but with strangely (inclement) warm temperatures. It seems so strange to see leaves on the ground and yet it is 16 or 17°C. A time to be thinking about COP 27 and the implications of a rise in global temperatures.

Thank you for all of your efforts this week. It’s been full on, I know! A massive thank you to all those who attended and supported the TRC open evening on Wednesday. It was a very busy evening and importantly, it was a successful, inspirational and aspirational affair. The children and young people that I spoke to on the evening, many of whom I would know from my Oakwood connections, were blown away by the courses on offer and the facilities in which those classes will be delivered.

As always, at this time of year, across the trust schools and in the college, there have been events to recognise Armistice Day, through remembrance activities. I was chatting to some young people this week about why we still hold this day and we reflected upon how one might see this series of events as about a past which has passed, a perceived irrelevancy of remembrance. What we did reflect upon though was how simply by a quirk of time we can live here safely in the UK, without having to fight wars. History has been relatively kind to my/our generation. That seems to me nothing more than the deal of the hand, luck and/or circumstance. I know that if I’d been born some 40 years earlier I would’ve been a simple Tommy, fighting in land I didn’t know and I hadn’t visited, against an enemy I didn’t fully understand. My family did that. They weren’t officers and gentlemen. They weren’t decision-makers. They were just ordinary men and occasionally women who were caught up in global events. If we ever needed a reason to continue to recognise armistice day and remembrance events that would be it for me. We should recognise the contributions of those who, simply through circumstance or geography alone, had to fight and risk giving their life for something not of their making.

I hope that you found some time to quietly reflect today, and if not today, I hope you’ll find that time on Sunday morning.

‘All warfare is based on deception’. Unknown