MEMBERS of Wellington Women’s Institute, that bastion of ‘Englishness’, have been adorning areas of the town with displays of poppies they have spent much of the past year knitting and crocheting.

We all know, or should know, why they do it, what the red poppies represent. Those who don’t, need to take a long, hard, look at themselves.

But, as the years go by, 80 of them since D Day, 106 since the end of the First World War, it seems more and more different varieties of poppy spring up.

Currently, in the town centre can be seen red, purple, and yellow poppy displays ahead of next week’s annual acts of Remembrance.

Perhaps less known is the fact that today there are also black poppies and white poppies.

Each is supposed to recognise something slightly different: purple for animals, yellow for women who worked in munitions factories, black for people of colour, white for pacifists.

It may be, as a customer on table 56 in the Iron Duke was recently overheard to observe: “Didn’t they all have something in common, they all died, so why shouldn’t the red poppy remember them all?

“Bring me my bow of burning gold… purple, white, and every other colour!”