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So these are some passing thoughts that came to me while I was watching Simoun. Simoun's heroes are pilots but also religious figures; some of the military aviation elements of the plot reminded me of the First World War aviation fiction I read when I was younger, which led on to the thought that here in Britain the dead of the First World War are somehow holy, in an oddly secular way. Why?

The war itself has, more or less, passed out of living memory. That's beginning to happen to the Second World War too, but those who are on the upper edge of middle age now were brought up by people who lived through WW2, and even I have heard one or two eyewitness accounts of events from that war. WW1 is mostly symbols now: poppies, of course, and endless rows of white crosses. It's also the war that started the tradition of Remembrance Day, and it left less of a tangible impact on our landscape — it was bombing during WW2, not WW1, that determined my hometown's streetmap. Finally, the most memorable suffering of WW2 was civilian suffering. The dominant event of WW2 is the Holocaust; the dominant event, for Britons at least, of WW1 is the Somme. So the memory of the First World War is more the memory of its soldiers in particular.

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