🎶There ain’t nothing like a Dame🎶
When Dame Vera Lynn, the UK’s WWII Forces’ Sweetheart, turned 100 a few years ago, I recycled an old tongue-in-cheek limerick. You can read it here.
Well, she has just died at the grand old age of 103. Quite an innings, but I wonder, I just wonder, that with her passing and that of the recent 75th anniversary of VE day, whether the UK can finally place the part it played in WWII in its historical context, albeit its modern history, instead of re-living its glories every time our present-day politicians want to divert attention from the divisiveness of their policies.
I’m all for Rememberance, but only in its truest sense and not as a pretext for ‘uniting’ a country behind xenophobic populism. Dame Vera was symbolic of unity for the right reasons; reasons that led to the UK’s post-war social democratic concensus rather than the bitter divides that neoliberalism has brought about more recently.Â
Anyway, here’s a ‘goodbye’ in ALAW fashion…
A songstress who enthralled servicemen
Sings no more, as the time has come when
It’s ‘adieu’ to Dame Vera
And the end of an era
‘Cos I don’t think that we’ll meet again!
