I was at the Cenotaph this year remembering someone close to me who's gone. Someone who served in the army. No one at the Cenotaph was feeling pleased with themselves because they'd dropped 50p into a poppy collector's box. No one there was indulging in "Our Boys" rhetoric. Most people had lost someone. I wish I could still revel in the ignorance that allows people to suggest people are "poppy nazis" because they think the country owes the military a debt of gratitude.

It's not that I don't respect soldiers, and I feel for anybody that has lost someone because of war. I've always honoured the two minutes silence and I try to go to Remembrance Parades and my objections to the Poppy don't change that. But I don't agree with war, and particularly not any of the ongoing conflicts that are just a waste of life, and I don't think the Army should be glamorised. The Poppy should be more used as a symbol for the condemnation of War and of it's grief, and we should also remember non-British victims, the countless number of civilians that have died in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.