WAR AND PEACE AND RELIGION AND SHOPPING

      Love it or loathe it, we all have an opinion on war. Funny to think that, generations ago, people were tumbling over the dunes with their archaic guns and blowing up Nazis with a view to ending war altogether. Of course, as time has gone on we find that the odd war does no real harm and, in fact, is good for things like technology, tourism and the nation’s sense of self worth. One thing’s for sure, I couldn’t do it myself. I’d enjoy the travelling side of it, of course, but I’d hate the other, well documented, downsides. For me the opening half hour of Schindler’s List provokes the same reaction as an episode of The Office – I’m behind the sofa, cringing; I can barely watch. The idea of staggering around on a beach looking for my own arm fills me with dread, quite honestly. Also, I am one of these people who overthinks things, so, even though I’d know, deep down, that I was being daft, I’d be worrying that a lot of the soldiers I was peppering with bullets might be really great guys. Of course, there’s no way of checking this, as, by the time you’re close enough to chat to them, or to see if there is common ground in terms of tastes in music et cetera, the evil buggers have peeled off a dozen pellets into your eye. I have talked to my father about this. He openly admits he took the coward’s way out and was born right at the very end of WWII. He has no great lust for war and, in his darker moments, has stated that he thinks there should be no more wars at all. The money saved, he argues, could be plunged into more sophisticated paintballing centres to satiate the needs of the bloodthirsty. On several occasions I have stated to him that without wars a large part of my income, of any poet’s income, would be hugely compromised. At this point he starts spouting nonsense like ‘Why can’t you write about peace?’ and we have to agree to disagree. To write poems where no one is suddenly obliterated by a bomb would be overwhelmingly disrespectful to the likes of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and those other brave balladeers who risked all to report on death for our entertainment. And so it is that I have devoted a whole section to war (with a couple of poems about religion and some shopping ones thrown in so we don’t slit our wrists at the horror of it all!).