So we crashed the Remembrance Day Service at Westminster Abbey

As many of you know, my life often has elements of, shall we say, ridiculousness. Sometimes this works out to my advantage, however. We headed to Westminster Abbey early-ish on Thursday morning, and there was a line when we got there, but not too bad. As we're standing in line, I started to realize that 1) everyone looks over the age of 65, and 2) everyone is wearing war medals. We all had on poppies (they have paper poppies sold by I think the British Legion on the street, you give a donation for them and then pin them to your coat, it's a great thing) so we kind of blended in. We had to pass through a metal detector which seemed kind of strange to me, but I didn't really think much about it. When we got through this is what we saw. It was crazy. All the little plots were for different battalions/sections of the Navy, Air Force, Army, etc. They do have different names for them, but I'm not quite sure what they are.

So it was packed with Veterans, and we weren't quite sure what to do. A man came over and told us to "get to our plot, because he would be here soon." Rather cryptic. We just picked a spot that seemed fairly uncrowded. I started talking to the old woman next to me about the different medals people had on. Apparently this one woman had on a larger medal that you were only supposed to wear at night for state dinners, but as it was her husband's medal she must not have known any better. It was crazy to look around and see all the people who had come. They do so much more in honoring their Veterans than we do.


The doors swung open and the clergy came out. They did a few prayers and then the trumpeters played reveille from the roof. All I could see was the bells of the trumpets. It was so cool. And then they read part of a Churchill speech which is now part of the service, and everyone in unison said "we will remember them", and I got shivers. They view the World Wars so much differently then we do. We did have civilian deaths in Hawaii, but for them it was people in so many different cities being bombed. I can't even imagine.

A bunch of camera people started moving out on to the walkway. "It figures," said my new old woman friend, "they let those people out from behind the railings but they don't let the Veterans." And then they announced the Duke of Edinburgh, and there he was. I mean, granted, he's not the coolest member of the royal family you could get. But he does have a military history, and as my godmother pointed out, he does look pretty good for being 86 years old. My old woman was not impressed though. "Is the Queen not here?" she said to Ken the Veteran from Birmingham behind me. "Well, she wasn't here last year, was she?" he replied. "So she wasn't," said my old woman. "Her back's been playing up." So I guess that is that.

Prince Phillip circled all the Veterans and shook hands with people. He was accompanied out with some of the clergy, hopped into his Rolls Royce (is that what they use?) and drove off. What a weird experience. And all these British people were standing outside the gates taking pictures of him, I think if we had arrived just a little bit later we wouldn't have been able to get in. So sometimes being a farce has it's advantages.