Today is Armistice Day. Ninety years after the end of the war known as World War I we still remember.

My thoughts today are wide-ranging. I think of the small number of men who still live to remember this war, men whose ages break records. I think of the day when, rehearsing to sing in the Flanders Festival in Gent on September 11, 2001, the modern technology of the mobile phone brought the creeping news, mid rehearsal, of the destruction of New York’s Twin Towers. Still in shock, our performance that evening of Verdi’s Requiem was sombre. I think of the Germans of my generation who, born years after the Second World War ended, have been taught to bear a sense of responsibility for the acts of their countrymen – whilst I, in England, have not. I think of the beauty – paradoxical perhaps – of many poems written following the First World War and of Britten’s War Requiem. I think of Sebastian Faulks’ novel, Birdsong, which, more than any other experience I had had prior to reading it, gave me a visceral sense of the experiences of those young men who fought in the trenches in World War I. I think of the men and women who, whether willingly or not, have given their lives, their limbs and so much more in war.

I feel moved to write and still, I wonder where to focus my attention. Until slowly the thought surfaces: what is it that we want for our future? I think of hopes nurtured for many, many years – only last week Barack Obama’s election as first black President of the United States of America gave birth to a hope fulfilled for people – black and white – all over the world.

What then, of those who nurture the hope that we may, one day, live in peace together on this earth? I take a moment to sit with this hope, to cherish it. One day.