WOYWW - Lest We Forget

Well it has been a hectically busy week and sadly no crafting done whatsoever !

I spent 3 days in Poland on business - what a beautiful country - oh but how flat it is !!
I was amazed - we drove for 5 hours through lush fertile countryside - all as flat as a pancake !
The houses & farms were very much in the Northern European style and reminded me of Holland or Northern Germany.







Then on Saturday drove to London & went straight to the Meatopia event being held at Tobacco Dock in London.

This is a big BBQ festival - we went for work to see all the new products but as we had our other halves with us - we had fun too !!

The venue is in a restored warehouse complex in the Docklands - a real urban renovation - and it made a great venue - open roofed so the billowing clouds of BBQ smoke could escape !





We were staying near Tower Bridge and I very much wanted to see the Remembrance Project being installed at the Tower of London so we walked up early Sunday to get a good look.

In commemoration of the Centenary of the start of the Great War in 1914 they are creating over 888,000 ceramic poppies - each one to commemorate a British life lost in the First World War.

They are installing them in batches from 4th August - when war was declared - to Remembrance Day on 11th November - and even with what they have installed so far it is an amazing sight - a sea of red poppies in the moat of the Tower.

The poppies are cascading from windows and down the walls and massed in undulating drifts the moat ...

The display boards explain what the project is all about ...

On the early Sunday morning we were there, they were preparing to "plant" a new batch of poppies, the ceramic petals are sent down from the ceramic workshops & kilns in Derbyshire.

The metal stems have the black centres added and the the ceramic petals are added to complete the full poppy.

You can see the white bags of stems & centres ready to create the poppies.

The organisers were marking out areas of the grass with red spray paint to indicate where the next drift of poppies are to be "planted".

My Great Grandfather - serving in the Royal Engineers- was killed in Belgium in 1915 - it left my Grandmother an orphan and changed the whole course of her life.

This is of course very personal to me but it struck me it was just one of nearly a million stories.

And that was just those killed - not the additional thousands maimed or emotionally drained by the horrific fighting'

Every poppy in the commemoration had just such a story, a family changed for ever, a life path skewed into a new challenging direction for those left behind.

It made seeing the poppy display very moving.

I was so glad to have seen something that is a once in a lifetime event.

Do go to see it if you can ! Or at least look on-line to see all about it !

To complete my hectic week I am off on holiday to Turkey tomorrow - so may be a bit late visiting this week !
Have a great week
Ali xx