As I walked along the Thames....

...people were streaming towards the Tower of London  and the poppies....

My destination was across the river, at The Borough, where the congregation of Precious Blood church walked in procession, led by the churchwardens carrying staves,and the Rector in cope and biretta, to the War Memorial in the High Street.  Here, all was done very well and in full traditional style, with "O God our help in ages past" and the Last Post - and the police stopped all the traffic for the Silence, giving us a rather beautiful  experience of a London High Street at peace, The Mayor is a Sikh and his  local Sikh leader read splendidly from the Bible about swords being beaten into ploughshares. The Mayor is extremely nice - we met him the other day when setting out for the John Paul II Walk along the Thames,as he happened to be finishing some other formal event, all in red robes and golden chain of office, and  he greeted the young JP Walkers and it made a very good start to the day...Today, laying the first of a great series of scarlet wreaths, he was again resplendent in formal robes, and there was  Autumn sunshine, and the voices uniting in "We will remember them..." and the  Lord Lieutenant and  local MPs  and councillors and  so on all coming forward one by one to place their wreaths and stand for a moment...

I spent the afternoon with family out beyond London, a magnificent nephew having volunteered to tackle a computer problem.  A woodland walk with a young relative, tracking the course of a local stream...an agreeable sense of adventure along muddy paths and through Autumn mulch, through new territory for us, these woods previously unexplored.    Quite suddenly, we came across small Remembrance crosses bearing poppies, planted in the ground - all in the middle of woodland.   A brass plate nearby explained that the great tree alongside had been planted in 1919 in thanksgiving for the ending of the War...