Wednesday 2^nd May

On Wednesday 25^th April I was very much fast asleep in my cosy warm bunk on 2XS.  At 7.00 Pete, in startlingly chipper tones, said, “Time to go!”  Oh no…I thought he might have forgotten his clearly stated aim of the night before.  To join in the Anzac Day parade…

I didn’t object to this in principle, but in reality I was so tired, and so keen on staying asleep – no need to leap about and get ready for work!  So very bleary-eyed and tottery I was as we walked across to the path leading to the Cenotaph, just a few hundred metres from the marina.  It was cold and bleak and threatening to rain, and amazingly, there were hundreds of people making their way along the path.  Family groups, old codgers, school children.

The service was beautiful, and so familiar – the same hymns, the same words, as we repeated every year in freezing Royal Park when I was at Launceston High.  A pipe band, a brass band, a soprano, a bugler who played most beautifully. 

In the midst of the crowd we spied Greg, our lone-sailor Canadian friend, in his red lumberjack shirt.  He came for dinner the next day and we asked him what he had thought.  “Well,” he said, very seriously, “It was the best service I have ever been to.  Very moving.  Lovely live music - a brass band, for heaven’s sake!  Nice to see so many people with wreaths; a great crowd of all ages.  It was, however, much too religious for me.”  And then, after a bit more thought, “But any amount of religion is too much for me.”