I wear the red poppy, as others do, to remember and honour those who died serving their country during wars. It is personal to me as well, not because a close relative died, but because my father, and my uncles, his two brothers, served in the second World War, so I saw little of my father for the first four years of my life while my mother was in effect a single parent; and also because I never had a chance to meet my maternal grandfather who died in the influenza epidemic which followed and was in large part caused by the first World War, as serious outbreaks of ill-health often are by war.
I wear the white poppy because my main interest in war is in trying to prevent it. War remembrance, signified by the red poppy, is ambiguous on the subject of preparation for war. This was very clear this morning watching BBC television. The service at the cenotaph was preceded by the Laura Kuenssberg politics programme where a main topic was the need for more money to be spent on armaments for defence at a dangerous time. Among my conclusions in On the Warpath is that support for war is more likely, the more we are prepared for war, and the more we hear and accept claims that we are exposed to threat and danger. Unlike the red poppy, the white stands unequivocally for peace. The two together show that previous sacrifices are recognised and not forgotten, but that the wearer is in no doubt that peace is the goal.