We’ve made it something of a family tradition in the past few years to have a pre-Christmas escape for a few days and this year we headed to northern France ostensibly to visit a Christmas Market or two and stock up on wine for the festive season.

Knowing we were going to be based in the Somme Valley we decided it would be an apt time to pay a visit to the World War One war graves which I’ve read so much about but never seen.

It was a trip I’d always hoped to make with my late father, who like me was a history lover, who never knowingly passed a historic site, without making a stop, much to the chagrin of my sister, who would let out a mournful cry of ‘not another battlefield’ or more dramatically on one occasion stage a two hour tantrum in a parked car as Dad and I marched our way over the site of the Battle of Bannockburn trying to ignore the screams from the visitors’ centre.

That he wasn’t with us made our visit to the war graves at Arras probably more poignant as we felt his loss on that day as strongly as any of those visiting the last resting places of their long-dead relatives.

As we walked the rows of graves reading the epitaphs of boys, most of whom hadn’t reached the age of 20 before being cut down by a war created by ego and intransigence, it brought it home how so very little has changed and how very lucky we are.

Like so many families ours has experienced pain and loss over the past few years and those we were missing were not far from us as we took a quiet moment in that cemetery in France. But unlike so many people across the world, we were safe in the knowledge we could wake up in our beds in the morning to the sound of an alarm clock and not a bomb going off and we had food and water and warm home to enjoy over the festive season.

Pope Francis wrote some time ago, ‘War is the suicide of humanity because it kills the heart and kills love. War destroys, kills, and impoverishes’ and walking among the rows of graves a few weeks ago illustrated that all too graphically.

How many families have been impoverished by the loss of fathers and sons over the centuries and how many continue to feel the same loss today because egos and opinions refuse to bend and common sense is anything but common.

After all the preparation, our Christmas celebrations are over and here we are on the first day of brand new year and I hope that 2025 will be a good one for everyone. A year when, as Albert Einstein counselled we can, ‘Learn from yesterday, live for today and hope for tomorrow’.

As always all the team here at the Chronicle is grateful for your ongoing support in going out every week to buy the paper or read our stories online and we would like to wish all our readers a happy, healthy and prosperous 2025.