I’ve promised Antimo that I’d get him a poppy today. “It’s how we show our respect for the soldiers who died in the war,” I explained. At the end of the First World War poppies were the only plant growing on the barren battlefields of Northern France. It was Canadian surgeon, John McCrae that captured the image of the poppy in his beautiful “In Flanders Fields” poem written while serving in Ypres in 1915. “In Flanders fields the poppies blow….. To you from failing hands we throw the torch; be yours to hold it high.”