The fire alarm sounds, which signifies a 2 minutes silence at 11 o’clock. Many of us were not expecting it, but the penny drops quickly and we all stop typing and talking and clicking. No car seems to pass by the window, the whole country, one could imagine, is in this silence together.

You sit staring at your flat screen monitor, wondering what you’ll have for lunch, sitting in your spacious office with its chair at exactly the right height so you don’t develop back problems in later life. Did it really happen, all those years ago? 750 thousand dead men, mostly lying under French soil; having suffered the unimaginable black pit of human misery. Do we sit here in the warmth, with fat tummies and without the fear of death hanging over us – because of what they did? They were just fighting for their survival, the nation state told them to walk slowly towards the machine gunners and die quietly like good Britons. But they still did it.

If we forget to try and remember just how bad living on planet Earth can get, it will almost certainly happen again. Perhaps more quickly, but suffering is suffering. If we want to avoid pain we have to remember theirs. Word.