REMEMBRANCE Day came and went this year and I didn’t wear or buy a poppy for probably the first time in my adult life.

Although my memory is not the best, this wasn’t a question of forgetting to remember but a deliberate decision not to wear the emblem.

It was a symbolic omission, although my family may have found it surprising given that my father was a vice-president in his local Royal British Legion branch and an avid poppy seller for many years.

Indeed, as my father and his father both fought in wars, ending up as PoWs, it should have been second nature to pop a bit of folding stuff in a collection box and proudly sport a poppy.

I ought to be particularly grateful to the Royal British Legion because when my dad was in his seventies the charity arranged for him to have a replacement knee fitted at an army hospital.

Apparently, it’s the sort of the thing the British Army is happy to do for old veterans.

It also keeps their surgeons’s hands in, so to speak. After the operation, the clinician, a major, was due to fly off to Bosnia or somewhere similar to run a military hospital treating wounded solders in the Balkans War.

Memories of my popular Uncle Ron (who was really my cousin, but that’s another story) should also have prompted me to buy a poppy this year because he died 25 years ago.

He joined up after the Second World War and didn’t actually fight - but he was badly injured when a jeep he was a passenger in careered off a mountain road in Scotland during a training exercise.

He lost the sight of one eye, hearing in one ear and his sense of taste and smell.

He also had a metal plate in his head, but he didn’t complain.

So, given all this, why didn’t I buy a poppy this year?

Well, I reckon injured ex-soldiers are getting well looked after in the charity stakes these days, with organisations such as Help for Heroes.

No, this year what I’m going to do is double my monthly gift to Oxfam - in memory of the innocent kids whose lives have been ruined by conflict.