This was an Anzac Day like none that we have seen before. No parades of veterans marching proudly through the streets. No crowds to wish them well and cheer them on. No gunfire breakfast to warm the cockles of the heart. No game of two-up to fritter away the weeks pay. No game of footy to take away the voice for a few days at least. And, above all, on this solemn Saturday, no golf to frustrate the hell out of you.
Instead, the isolation brought people to their front yards and footpaths to set up shrines and to lay out fields of poppies and to light candles. Some played their radios and televisions at full volume. Some dragged out their cornets. Some dragged out the trumpets. Some their clarinets. And some dragged out their bagpipes. And a lot just stood in silence. Lest we forget.
But, the isolation has set people off on all sorts of tasks that they have been meaning to do for years and years. Ben has obviously been sorting and cataloguing all those shoe boxes of photographs that he has collected over the years and came across the little gem above. The size of the trophy suggested that it was a Major but he couldn’t for the life of him remember what it was.
So, he resorted to the Statistics pages on the web-site but could not find his name and figured that somehow he had been missed out. He then searched laboriously through the archives (he hasn’t been able to find the trophy yet but the lock-down will last for a while longer yet) and discovered that it was the Matchplay Championship for 2011. Sure enough, his name did appear in every place in the various lists that it was supposed to (how could he think otherwise?). He was just looking in the ‘wrong’ one.
Which just goes to prove that little things do mean a lot whether it is Anzac day or not.