OC 1645

The poppy is the recognized symbol of remembrance for war dead in the UK, the countries of the British Commonwealth, and the United States. The flower owes its significance to the poem "In Flanders Fields", written by Major (later Lieutenant-Colonel) John McCrae, a doctor with the Canadian Army Medical Corps, in the midst of the Second Battle of Ypres, in Belgium, in May 1915. The poppy references in the first and last stanzas of the most widely read and oft-quoted poem of the war contributed to the flower's status as an emblem of remembrance and a symbol of new growth amidst the devastation of war.....

Sir Colby, sorry to hear you weren't well enough for the pitch invasion and I wish you a speedy recovery. As I predicted last week nothing stopped me, as one of the maddest of the BCFC Mad March Hares, haring across the pitch yesterday. I was bedecked in my subcider yellow marigolds when that final whistle blew. Dolly Marie as Alice in Wonderland hypothesises....... "The March Hare will be much the most interesting, and perhaps as this is May and City have gained promotion he won't be raving mad -- at least not so mad as he was in March when promotion wasn't so sure."

I got a handful of the Ashton Gate 2007 promotion turf that I've now planted in my garden.

At the moment it's just the black Zimbabweans (former Rhodesians) that are protesting here - those protests are mainly in London. Blame Margaret Thatcher for the current problems in the former Rhodesia as it was her Government of Tory Party scummers in 1980 that allowed the former British colony of Rhodesia to drift into chaos under the tyrant Mugabe. The Thatcher administration could have given Zimbabwe/Rhodesia some help in forming a proper democratic administration but like our own British coal industry and manufacturing industry Zimbabwe/Rhodesia was allowed to drift into chaos.