Commonwealth Day 2008

Today is Commonwealth Day. The day you give thanks for, among other things, Canadians.

You'll know who we are. We're the ones lining up at the Garlicky Little Foreign People with Dodgy Passports queue at Immigration while the Finns and Lithuanians breeze through with EU passports.

A tradition designed to compensate for all those years of ignoring and overlooking us is the giving of quite splendid gifts to Commonwealth citizens on the second Monday in March. Best wishes to Canadians and other Commonwealth citizens can be left here in the comments box. Monetary gifts or gifts in bottles with consonant-heavy Scottish names printed on them can be sent via the post.

An article in the Telegraph bemoaning recent attempts to restrict Commonwealth immigration can be found here.

Teach your children to cherish their nearest Canadian vicar (and not to bang their hard church shoes on the pew during his children's talk) by going to the Young Commonwealth site.

Lying in bed covered in bandages with tubes hanging out of you? The Commonwealth Nursing Federation has some ideas for celebrating Commonwealth Day.

My 'Commonwealth moment' came about ten years ago standing under the Menin Gate in Ieper (Ypres) Belgium. A bugler from the Ypres Fire Department plays the Last Post every night at 8:00 pm. School children from around the world visit the site. Not infrequently one of them is asked to read the usual fragment of McCrae's poem - "they shall not grow old.....". This particular evening it was a little girl visiting from New Zealand with her family who took her job very seriously - solemn little Kiwi dipthongs echoing throughout the chamber. Her dad was visibly chuffed and clearly proud of her.

On the wall were the large number of names (among others from around the Empire) of members of my regiment - the Canadian Grenadier Guards - who were killed in battle and whose bodies were never recovered and identified.