V-Day/8 May

Armistice Day, V-Day, whatever you want to call it -- it's a national holiday in France and at around 11am the people of Lorgues gathered in front of the mayoral offices to march down the main street to the town square to hold a ceremony in front of the war memorial, in honour of the unconditional German surrender during WWII and the end of combat in Europe. There were speeches, wreath laying, a brass band, a children's choir, the normal kind of memorial stuff -- though it wasn't nearly so longwinded as some of the ceremonies I've endured in Australia. We don't celebrate the end of WWII, just Remembrance Day and ANZAC Day... I wonder why?

Here's a generic May 8 ceremony photo from http://www.safie.hq.af.mil/photos/ -- it's more or less pretty similar to how things looked this morning only with fewer dignitaries and a smaller war memorial statue.



And here's my explanation to Baptiste of what the ceremony was for, though I doubt he fully understood me. To get the full effect, imagine a tiny blonde boy talking gibberish to himself and walking down the street in the slightly unco-ordinated manner of all toddlers, whilst holding the hand of his also quite tiny nanny, who, using a singsong children's voice, is saying the following:

"Sometimes when lots of people in one country can't resovle their differences with lots of people in another country, they go to war, which is a very big fight. Lots of people die, which isn't really fair because the people dying aren't the ones who decided to go to war in the first place, and the people who make the decisions stay where it's safe. After the fighting has finished, we have ceremonies like this one to help us remind us how brave the soldiers were and how bad war is. This doesn't really help the poor soldiers who died or were injured but it makes us all feel a bit less guilty about sending them off to their deaths. And hopefully it also reminds us to try harder next time to solve our problems without fighting. The End."

Obviously, I should go into children's publishing.