By Dr George Hay

At 11 o’clock on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, we stop.

The airwaves go quiet, even phones seem to hush themselves. For two minutes, the country that debates everything becomes entirely silent. It is strange, when you think about this small pause.

No one’s in charge of it, there are no hashtags or influencers telling us to join in, and yet it happens because people feel they should. 

And that is the point. In an age of opinion and debate, commemoration manages to exist outside the noise. We stop thinking about who is right or wrong and focus on the one thing we can agree on: the faint but stubborn idea that some things are worth standing still for. 

New research commissioned by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) found that three-quarters of Britons (75%) still think days of commemoration should continue be marked –........

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