The act of commitment that closes the ceremony is a useful reminder of the duties that come with commemoration and the challenge to ensure that action follows fine words

My Gran's 103 now and starting perhaps to fade a little, so that memory seems all the more poignant & fragile. I was up at the end of October to see her, and my Mum drove my Gran up to Kintail this weekend to see family & feel home. So, on Armistice Day, that is my small story of family remembrance

The romantic in me would insist that I felt the wind stir, but what I know happened was that when I told my Mum & my then 100 year old Gran about my visit, they felt touched by the connection & the small act of remembrance.

When I visited Duisans that summer while in France in 2022, I wasn't too sure what you're meant to do, so tried to talk as if to the person buried there and spoke aloud the Gaelic inscription from that Macrae war memorial by Clachan Duich: gus am bris an là

Nearby Ault a'chruinn is Clachan Duich, the Macrae graveyard where you can find the war memorial sitting high above Loch Duich

www.iwm.org.uk/memorials/it...

To bring it a bit closer to home, here's a photo of me (the glaikit looking wean), my Mum, my Gran, and my Great-Granny Macrae (née Christina McAskill) taken up in Ault a'chruinn

Christina McAskill married Alexander Macrae, also of Kintail. Here are both their passes from living in the area during the First World War, when it was a Special Military Area. Sandy has a photo, Christina a description

My Gran has a family photo from 1905 that shows them in front of the house at Beolary, Kintail. Allan is the boy on the far left, the girl with short hair to the right of the baby is Christina McAskill, my Granny Macrae (aged 8 in the photo)

His planned book should be a short one!

Picked my daughter up from school yesterday & asked if she'd had a good day, then she replied "yesh" in a Sean Connery impersonation that cracked me up. Apparently she didn't know who he was but had heard me doing it. I then scrambled for reference points she'd get & landed on: Indiana Jones' Dad