With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill: Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres.
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

They mingle not with laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England’s foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain,
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.

“For the Fallen” by Laurence Binyon, originally published in The Times on 21 September 1914, and the source of the more common “Ode to Remembrance”

Over the last few months, as I’ve written about before, we’ve been attending one of the local Slimming World groups in an effort to lose a bit of weight. Obviously I’ve got more to lose than Herself, but we’re both working on it.

So far it’s been fairly successful – we’ve both lost a stone over that time. We could, in all honesty, have lost more, and/or in less time if we followed all the rules and weighed everything obsessively.

But that’s the key word – in my opinion, there’s an awful lot of this weight-loss stuff that is actually about doing stuff obsessively. We’ve seen three (I think) “group leaders” now, all of whom have lost significant amounts of weight – and absolutely fair play to them for doing so, they’ve done fantastically well – but all of whom are (to be polite about it) just a little bit crackers. There’s a number of examples of this, although right now I can’t be arsed to list them.

The one that keeps on coming back to me, though, was the one who was still utterly obsessed by food – all she’d done was replace high-calorie foods with low-calorie ones. But there was still that slightly crackers gleam in the eye when she was talking about being able to eat “whole bowls of no-Syn trifle to yourself” and so on.

And I find I just don’t have that obsessive part to me – and to some degree it actually leaves me feeling quite uncomfortable. I’m not obsessed with food, nor do I collect anything obsessively, or really anything else. It’s simply not part of me.

I don’t know where I’m going with this, to be honest. It’s just something I’ve noticed and wanted to write about it. And maybe that’s it, maybe writing is my obsessive behaviour, whether it be D4D™ or other writing projects. In some ways I’d actually be quite happy if that were the case. I just don’t know if it is.