Dead Prole Day

Unless you've been hiding under a rock all day*, you will know that today is Remembrance Sunday. A time for quiet reflection on all those people who have died defending their pile of dirt, someone else's pile of dirt, a pile of dirt they have stolen from another person, or whatever unrelated pile of dirt they happened to be standing on before the explosion.

I've got awful de-ja vu at this point, probably because I've wrote this blog post before. Last year, or maybe the year before that. That's the funny thing about Remembrance Day. Despite happening every year, it occurs with less frequency that the act of war itself, which is a giant fuck you to people who take it seriously.

The moment Ed Miliband realized he was standing with a bunch of psychopaths.

In April 2007 I was at work, which in itself is not unusual. A customer came in to buy cigarettes, and being a keen smoker myself, I normally skip the whole self-righteous 'You know that will kill you' routine, because pretty much anything is capable murdering you when it so chooses. Anyway, this time I didn't, because she had proudly told me that she'd quit smoking some months ago, and was doing very well, thank-you very much. So I asked her what had gone wrong, and she told me that the thing that had gone wrong was that her brother's Warrior armoured car had triggered a huge IED in Iraq, killing him and all of the other people in the car. He was a local lad who my dad taught at primary school. He was, at the time of his dead, just over a year older than me. He has an online memorial, which I will do everyone the favour of not hyperlinking.

And then she left. There wasn't much more to it than that. Cool story, bro.

The nationals and red-tops listed the fatalities with ghoulish detail, focusing primarily on the other occupants of the car since they'd been hanging out with royalty at Sandringham, or something. And they were women, and women - as we well know - are delicate and fragile creatures designed for cooking and breeding and not cut-out to be robust killing-machines. The other two occupants, they were just dead proles. Heroes, of course, but proles all the same.

There isn't really a moral to this post. I mean, what is there to say? Today is dead prole day, where we remember with fondness all of the proles that came home in icecream tubs for some higher purpose. It is a day for maintaining a straight face. To even suggest a smirk is unthinkable, since it implies you aren't appreciating the gravity of the situation and consider it all to be one sick joke.

That is a lovely smile you have, Kate.

* All things considered, this is probably the most reasonable option available to most people.