Armistice

Beginning with several of the clergy, among others, on Sunday morning, and continuing while I was out and about in Lanchester today after having been away at Davey Ayre's funeral yesterday, I have been asked a dozen times why I had not laid a wreath "this year".

I have never laid a wreath on Remembrance Sunday, and it is not at all clear in what capacity I would do so these days. But several people are convinced that they have seen me do it in the past, and rather a lot seem to take it as read that I ought to be doing so now because, well, I am David Lindsay. For the record, I have no immediate plans to do so.

Every single one of my interlocutors knows perfectly well that I am not yet four months out of prison, but I have yet to meet anyone on the ground here who regarded that as anything other than the last in the long line of vicious acts by the mercifully overthrown right-wing Labour machine in County Durham. In two different pubs in Consett, two different teenage bartenders completely unknown to me have literally saluted and said "Mr Lindsay" as I entered the premises for the first time in their lives.

And now, this. As an extremely bitter cog in that machine said to me many years ago, "You think if you dress like royalty, talk like royalty and act like royalty, eventually people will find it easier just to treat you like royalty." I never have thought that. But somehow, to my utter bewilderment, something like that does now seem to be happening.