No doubt about the top half-term attraction last week: the Tower of London poppies had families squashed six deep trying to snatch a glimpse and a selfie of Paul Cummins's inspired installation.
How many were there to remember the fallen, how many wanted to see the spectacle and how many just wanted to know what all the fuss was about is hard to say. What is certain is that a piece of art had captured the public imagination on a scale unseen probably since the Tutankhamun exhibition rolled into London in the 1970s. It had been thought that four million would turn out to take a peek, but that may turn out to be a wild underestimate, given the clamour last week.
SubScribe thought in August that newspapers didn't seem to be taking much of an interest in the project, although they perked up once Wills and Kate turned up.
Then there was some sniffing about where the money from the sale of the poppies at £25 a pop was going. Only a pound a flower for good causes? How dare the artist, his team of workers and those who  risked their money to finance the venture take anything for their efforts? 
That million quid or so from the poppy sales will have been magnified several times by the raised profile of this year's appeal - especially with the withdrawal from Afghanistan last month. And there will be plenty of commercial enterprises that will have benefited from the installation. I bet the organisers wish they hadn't decided to clear it away so swiftly after its completion in time for Remembrance Sunday next week
Money. Have you noticed how everything ends up being reduced to its monetary value. 
We just don't get public art in this country. "Look at that!" we cry. "We could have paid for 12 nurses for a year with that. What a waste of public money!"
Yes, we need nurses. But a dozen more on the national strength won't make much difference to anyone, and what happens next year when the money that would have been saved by not buying the painting or statue or book has gone.
A piece of art lasts forever. Or should. 
Public art, usually sculpture, lifts the spirit, makes the humdrum more bearable. It's not there for the elite and is as available to the harassed mum with a screaming toddler on one arm and a baby in a pram heading for the shopping centre as it is for the duchess. It is indiscriminate. It is there to be enjoyed by black, brown, white, young, old, fat, thin, married, single, able-bodied or lame. No one can stop you looking. No one can stop you interpreting it in your own way.
But public bodies have to be brave to invest in art. There will always be someone to complain, as the Birmingham MP John Hemming did this week, that councils should instead focus on emptying the dustbins. The Arts Council is always the first to have its budget cut whenever there is a financial squeeze. The whingeing about the licence fee - the "scandal" that we should have to pay a hundred and fifty quid per family for unlimited access to everything the BBC has to offer - is incessant. Particularly from the corporation's rivals.

So this week there has been much debate about the depiction of a pair of Brummie sisters and their children in bronze outside the Birmingham library. What sort of an ideal of family life is this supposed to represent? 
Well, as SubScribe has written elsewhere, there was no intention to produce an ideal but to portray a "real" family.
The Mail, which was appalled by Gillian Wearing's sculpture, has squealed with delight at the poppies - now that millions have given it their seal of approval. On Friday it devoted a full page, a leader and a diary note to attacking the Wearing work. You could fairly say it was sneering.
SubScribe chooses the word because that is the one it tossed at the Guardian when one of its arts critics dared to suggest that the poppies might be a bit sanitised as a representation of the blood of war. Jonathan Jones actually applauded the fact that people were moved by an artwork, but he took issue with the number of poppies in the installation - one to represent every British serviceman or woman killed during the First World War.
It was, he thought, too inward looking, too nationalistic. What about the millions from other nations? If we wanted peace and  reconciliation, why were we concerned only with our own? As a payoff he said that if Cummings had wanted to depict the horror of war, he might have filled the Tower moat with barbed wire and bones.
It was an opinion, an art critic's appraisal of a piece of art. Not all of the piece was antipathetic, but it was the questioning sentences that upset the Mail and prompted a debate into which even the Prime Minister was drawn.
Yes, it was that serious.

Here is the Mail last Wednesday. The "sneering Guardian" didn't call anything fake or seek to replace the poppies with bones. One of its critics used some of those words, not necessarily in the same order.

Robert Hardman followed up with an essay on Thursday. On Friday and Saturday the Mail's leader writer and two columnists all sang the same chorus of condemnation of the Gillian Wearing family statue. Perhaps whoever put Wednesday's spread together thought that all newspapers insisted that all of its writers stick to the party line. The idea that someone who was allowed to write a blog on the Guardian website might express a view that hadn't been vetted and approved by the Secretariat was unimaginable.
The Mail was not alone in this, because by the time Cameron was asked to comment on the Jones view, other papers were talking about "the Left" and "Guardian lefties" wanting the poppies wrenched out out and replaced by barbed wire.
The Mail and Jones are both right - and both wrong. Both pieces of art make a political statement. But both are deserving of their place in our open spaces. Public art matters. The French understand it - look at the "papier mache" sporting figures on the bridges over the road from Calais to Boulogne, whose only purpose is to look nice and raise a smile.  
We are rubbish at it. We are too prosaic. We see accurate almost-photographic style representations of everyday objects as good art. We need educating. Bring on more public art in all its forms.

Did you turn out the lights between 10 and 11 last night? Did you leave a single lamp burning? If so, was this a deliberate act of remembrance or the usual bedtime routine?
Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War. Today is the 30th anniversary of Richard Burton's death (the actor, not the explorer). Tomorrow is the 125th anniversary of the opening of the Savoy. 

Anniversary mania is a condition that had historically been controlled by keeping the features department in quarantine. But then along came open-plan offices and dodgy air conditioning units and before you knew it, the disease had become endemic in newspaper offices and quickly spread to all areas of public life.
Every decade after every slightly significant advance had to be marked with a book, an interview, a film, a television special (backed up with another book).

The American bicentennial in 1976 was a biggie. So was the Queen's silver jubilee the following year.
You'd expect the golden and diamond celebrations to be clearer in the mind - what with being more recent - but they are much fuzzier. Mugs and sovereigns for the kids, Brian May at the top of Buck House, Brian Wilson control-freaking it over the party at the palace crowd for the gold; a sodden river pageant and its dire television coverage, Gary Barlow, the Madness Our House light show and the Duke in hospital for the diamond.
You can have too many parties and pick up too many stray balloons and damp flags to maintain enthusiasm for another shindig round the corner.

What do you remember about 2005 and the bicentenary of Nelson's victory at Trafalgar? Do you know or care what has been planned for next year to mark the 200th anniversary of Wellington's victory over Napoleon at Waterloo? Or  if anything is in the pipeline for October next year to mark the 600th anniversary of our archers' success against the odds at Agincourt ? (One imagines that people were too busy worrying about the Western Front to have concerned themselves with jollities for the 500th.)

Yesterday the country was apparently united in remembrance of the boys sent to their deaths in the high summer of 1914. Boys sacrificed because the whole of Europe had taken up such intransigent positions and mobilised forces to such an extent that the Queen's grandfather and his two cousins had little choice but to wage war with each other, once Gavrilo Princip  obligingly fired the starting gun.

A hundred years on, against the distant clamour of neighbour fighting neighbour and brother fighting brother in Israel, Syria and Ukraine, we heard the sirens of platitude from European leaders, a solemn celebration of peace and lessons learnt.

The Press, too, dutifully fell into line;  backbenches vying to produce the starkest front page, the most evocative headline. 
"The world remembers" proclaimed the Times wraparound - untruthfully, for this was essentially a European weep-in. There were pictures from London, Belfast, Balmoral, Liege, Mons - and  Afghanistan, because we still have troops there.
And against what background was this sombre sentiment set? A picture of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, who could  as well have been heading across the grass to a country church wedding as to a  memorial service. 
The tell-tale gravestones were safely at the back of the wrap; the far more evocative picture - Paul Kingston's photograph of a Second World War veteran saluting a statue of a First World War tommy -  kept inside.

The Sun had Prince Harry looking noble above the heading "Harry's hero", and the Mail almost hit the jackpot with Kate and Harry - if only the Archbishop of Canterbury hadn't been in the foreground. 
It wasn't only the royals on  front-page duty: the unknown soldier was pressed into service again, with a lone candle on the tomb at Westminster Abbey, while young men dressed in early 20th century uniforms and a shower of poppies provided the Express and Star with their cover pictures.

There is, of course, no one left who served in the war, no one left who remembers the individuals who died. But we can create the illusion with photographs of old soldiers from other conflicts. Royalty with heads bowed, old men with campaign medals pinned to misshapen blazers, Chelsea pensioners, and Beefeaters among the Tower of London poppies are all brought into play.
[Paul Cummins's installation which will eventually have more than 888,000 ceramic poppies is, incidentally, the most imaginative, moving and spectacular memorial of all. SubScribe has been surprised by the limited space devoted to it in the papers so far, but Wills, Kate and Harry went to see it today, so it will no doubt figure prominently tomorrow.]

Those boys of a hundred years ago who thought they were fighting for King and country, for a great cause, did they want to be remembered like this - as characters in a giant act of enforced national breast-beating; their personal letters to their mums read out to the world?
If they believed they were engaged in the war to end all wars, what would they think of the symbolism of a prince wearing medals celebrating his grandma's longevity on the throne  carrying a lamp around a Belgian field while hundreds of his contemporaries adjust to life without the arms and legs blown off by roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan?
What would they think if they knew that far from "learning the lessons" of the Great War,  their country would go on to send nearly half a million more young men and women to die in a score of conflicts all over the world; that not a year would go by in the following century without British troops being involved in combat somewhere?

Of course we should honour the fallen. Of course we should remember and acknowledge the day that set the world on such a bloody path. But these events don't feel real, they don't seem heartfelt and instinctive. This is orchestrated homage and we are in danger of wallowing in this sea of reverence as we did in that ocean of sentimentality after the death of Diana. 

That initial spontaneous show of respect by the people of (now Royal) Wootton Bassett was the real deal, but it turned into a ritual and then a tourist attraction, until the town was finally swamped.
We appear to have an unerring ability to take a pure moment and reduce it to a source of entertainment, an occasion to publish a souvenir supplement, to snipe at a politician over the wording on his wreath or to assess the fashion sense of the lesser royals.

There will be many sad centenaries over the next four years - of  the Easter Rising and the Russian revolution as well as the Great War. We shall also see the 70th anniversaries of VE Day, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of VJ day, the 60th anniversary of Suez, the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement.

Would it not be good if these could be marked with restraint and respect, rather than as an opportunity to sell a book, plug a television series or give away a free bone china thimble (plus p&p, collect the whole set for £25).