When I got downstairs on Friday morning still trying to digest the result of the UK’s referendum on EU membership and the intention to resign of Mr Irresponsible aka Call me Dave aka David Cameron – who may now forever be known as the man who wrecked Britain – the sun was shining (briefly,) the birds were chirping, the bees were humming, so in one sense the vote didn’t matter. The sun will shine (at times) the birds will chirp and the bees hum (well we can hope) under any political circumstances.

But of course it does matter. The UK has been thrown into political turmoil, a rudderless chunk of driftwood at the mercies of whatever vicissitudes the markets and the attitudes of our spurned EU neighbours may put in our way and with both its major political parties internally at odds now that the Parliamentary Labour Party is attempting a putsch.

(I must say it takes a particular political genius, Dave, not only to trash your own personal political future, your place in history and the country’s fortunes with one act of folly but also with the outcome of that same act to throw into sharp relief the divisions between your political opponents such that it is they who make the headlines.)

The only stable political entities within the UK for the foreseeable future are the devolved ones in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast and the likelihood of the last one remaining stable is dubious at best.

But it seems that these devolved assemblies have to agree on EU withdrawal and to consent to the required changes in the Acts which set them up (see articles 70 and 71 of this House of Lords document.) Given that a substantial majority of Scots who voted in the referendum expressed a wish to remain in the EU the Scottish Parliament is unlikely to do this. What a mess.

Today the sun isn’t shining, I can hear no birds chirp nor bees hum. Tomorrow doesn’t belong to me.

There is a stairway halfway along each internal wall of the Menin Gate leading to the upper level. Here are laid wreaths brought to the Gate by various organisations.

The evening we were there the representatives of several schools performed that duty during the nightly Last Post ceremony to which this flag bearer was the prelude:-

The Last Post is played every evening at 8pm by members of Ypres Fire Brigade, a ceremony only ever interrupted since its inception by the German Occupation in World War 2 when it was apparently conducted at Brookwood Military Cemetery, in Surrey, England. On the evening of liberation in 1944 the ceremony was resumed despite fighting still taking place elsewhere in the city. A photograph of the ceremony in 1964 in In Flanders Fields Museum had few onlookers in it. The Last Post now attracts large crowds no doubt due to the greater ease of travel to Ypres from Britain and the countries of the British Commonwealth:-

Click on the picture below to go to a short video I shot of part of the ceremony:-