THIS short season at the end of the year, when the red leaves are falling from the trees surrounding the war memorial in Abingdon, is known by some in the church as Remembrancetide.

Individually remembrance takes many forms. Less so in the corporate sphere, where the red poppy dominates as a symbol of remembrance and familiar civic and military rituals of Remembrance Sunday and Armistice Day are about to be enacted once more in the communities of southern Oxfordshire.

Marked out at the beginning by All Saints' Day, it is followed the next day by All Souls' Day, which is an opportunity to come together to remember those who have died in the faith and especially relatives. For me, it has been especially poignant these last seven years, as there are no older surviving members of my immediate family left.

Thus it was last Wednesday after work I returned once more to the old parish on Cowley Road in east Oxford, where I had lived for more than twenty years, for a Requiem Mass, in honour of the faithful departed. It is unfamiliar ritual, not my usual style of church: there was much bowing, incense and bells and the ministers were vested in chasubles and assisted by acolytes.

However it was solemn and it was undoubtedly holy. God can be encountered in the most surprising of places.

At the door, I was asked to fill out a card bearing the names of anyone I wanted remembered in the service. There was a short conversation about me bearing the same name as my late father, a conversation which has taken place many times in my life and about which I wrote in his Eulogy, some seven years ago.

Two days later at work, the first personal tributes had appeared at the Abingdon War Memorial, which is adjacent to the night taxi rank. It’s not often it is possible to say that the civic authorities have facilitated a beautiful thing.

But this they do in Abingdon every year, and the people respond in a heartfelt manner. One of the tributes, already left in honour of a former solider of the Royal Berkshire Regiment, says it doesn't get any easier, after six years of loss.

The truth is it doesn't, nor in my experience after seven or even 49 years, as I was reminded in my taxi this week when I drove past the Royal Buckinghamshire Hospital in Aylesbury, where my uncle lost his life at the age of 21 half a century ago. I never knew him, but I do still remember him.

It is right to remember, both personally and corporately, in the civic life of the communities in which we live and work. The remembrance of those who have gone before us, who have facilitated freedom from war we now take for granted in the United Kingdom, and those who have made us who we are, is both fitting and proper.