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there’s just one snag.’
    ‘Which is?’
    ‘I’d have to live to 165,’ I said, and I went out, and round the corner, and got change out of a tenner. You know where you are, with a leg of lamb.

All Quiet On The Charity Front
    A S you know, many supermarkets, local authorities, and even some branches of the Royal British Legion have stopped
issuing pins with poppies this year, lest people not merely prick their fingers, but also claim compensation for wounds. Understandable, given these poignant memoirs of one veteran Poppy Day
survivor, which I make no excuse, on this special day, for quoting:
    There was three of us up there that morning, in the thick of it as per usual, me, Chalky White and Nobby Clarke. The rain was coming down stair-rods, the wind went through you like a wossname,
knife, but the mud was the worst. Slip off the pavement and you was done for; the lads do not call white vans whizz-bangs for nothing, you never hear the one that gets you.
    Anyway, we was all keeping our heads down, because there was poppy-sellers all over; they’d moved up in the night and now they was in position everywhere, but you couldn’t hardly see
most of them, they are crafty buggers, you got to give them that, you see an empty doorway, you reckon you’re all right, and suddenly they spring out from nowhere, they are on you before you
know it. That is how they got Chalky that morning: we was creeping along, staying close to the wall, we was all but at the pub, we could hear blokes getting ’em in, we could smell roll-ups,
and then Chalky only goes and sticks his head over the top for a shufti, and suddenly me and Nobby hears that terrible rattle what is like nothing else on God’s earth, and poor old Chalky
finds hisself looking down the wrong end of a collecting tin.
    Course, me and Nobby stood up as well, it is one for all and all for one in our mob, and we marched out, heads up, bags of swank, and Chalky shouts: ‘Wiffel ist es, Kamerad?’ because
he has always been a bit of a wag, he does not let things get him down, nil carborundum, and this woman takes his ten pee and she gives him one of them looks they have, they are not like us, never
will be, and hands him a poppy and a pin, and he says, ‘Aren’t you going to pin it on for me, Fraulein?’ and she says, ‘You want a lot for ten pee,’ so I say,
‘Leave it out, Chalky, it is not worth it, I’ll do it, come here,’ and I hold the poppy against his lapel and I take the pin and Chalky says, ‘Is this the Big Push
they’re always going on about?’ and I laugh so much that the pin goes and sticks right in my finger.
    Blood gushed out. I must have lost very nearly a blob. ‘Stone me!’ yells Nobby. ‘That is a Blighty one and no mistake. You will have to go straight home and put an Elastoplast
on it.’ Chalky looks at the woman. ‘This is the bravest man I know,’ he says. ‘He has got his knees brown, he has done his bit, but that does not mean he likes the taste of
cold steel up him. Look at that finger of his. It will not grow old as we that are left grow old. It may very well end up with a little scar on it. It might even turn sceptic and drop off into some
corner of a foreign wossname, he will never be able to find it. So gimme my ten pee back.’
    At this, despite the agony and spots before the eyes, I wade in, too; do not call me a hero, mind, I was just doing what any man would do in the circumstances, you would do the same. ‘As
soon I get this finger seen to,’ I inform her, ‘I shall be using it to dial my brief!’
    At this, she lets out a shriek, chucks the ten pee at us, and runs off. Typical or what? They do not have no bottle, poppy-sellers: oh, sure, they may look hot as mustard quartered safe behind
their lines, parading up and down outside Harrods in their spotless Barbours and their cashmere twinsets, with the sun winking off of their diamand brooches, and all smelling of Channel 4, but it
is a very different