“Gerhard Schroeder, the German Chancellor, has received an unprecedented invitation to ceremonies next June marking the 60th anniversary of the Allied D-Day landings in occupied France, the French have confirmed.” - at: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1-948833,00.html

We may trust that discrete inquiries will already have been made through the usual diplomatic channels as to whether the invitation will be welcome and hope that Gerhard Schroeder will be able to accept and attend.

A vivid childhood memory is of being awakened early by my father, at about 6 o’clock, on the morning of 6 June 1944 to watch the war planes, fighters, bombers, transports and gliders, flying low over south London on their way to the Normandy beaches. Of course, we didn’t know, for sure, it was Normandy the planes were flying to, but from the noise and the number of planes, it was fairly evident that this was the impending invasion of mainland Europe we had expected for so long.

It was weeks after D-Day that a V1 Flying Bomb, the precursor of present cruise missiles, landed at one end of the road where I lived then. Some more weeks on and a V2 rocket, a ballistic missile, landed at the other end of the road. It is perhaps experiences like that which make some of us especially cautious about wishing war on anyone.

I should like to be able to predict that 2004 will be a peaceful year in world affairs but I know it won’t be.