11.00am, 11/11/11, British Embassy Kabul; 200 of us affirming ‘we will remember them’; the poppy wreaths are laid at the memorial in the small garden, in front of which permanently stands the plaque for those ‘who died on 19 August 2011 protecting the British Council’.

For me, a moment for remembrance of 11/11s past.

The first, I recall, is in 1959, my fingers stuffed in my ears at 11.02 to obliterate the noise of the maroons firing over the Birmingham chapel where we are gathered, its roof still open to the skies due to German bomb damage.

2006, Egypt, the windswept desert of El Alamein; as the Commonwealth ambassadors take their wreaths to the cenotaph in the British War Cemetery, the Indian and Pakistan ambassadors choose to hold hands and advance together with their tokens of peace.

2010, the British Camp Bastion in Kabul with 1,000 squaddies; the two-minute silence drowned out by the constant passage of military helicopters and Hercules above; the padre amending his short sermon to increase the number of British casualties that year to include another private who had been killed overnight.

In a war zone, these ceremonies are drenched with sadness, significance and a vivid necessity. Remembrance is a part of the present’s cultural construct.

History is not an academic subject; it’s who we’ve become and therefore where we are going.

If the past is another country, then an international cultural relations organisation needs to include that country in its geographical mission. That nexus, that upbeat between ‘the going down of the sun’ and ‘the morning’ creates the future of the past and must – must – give hope.