“RING of steel around Queen to foil Cenotaph terrorist plot.” A headline for the Remembrance Sunday Service 100 years after the start of the First World War.

But wasn’t it precisely to remove the need for such a safeguard that the legions of British men perished in the First World War? The survivors believed that the sacrifice of their comrades had dealt a death blow to war itself.

Heavily-emphasised in the reporting of this year’s Cenotaph ceremony was the presence, for the first time, of the Irish Ambassador, laying a wreath for the thousands of Irish nationals who fought and died. In the past I’ve never heard it even whispered: “Of course, no wreath is laid on behalf of our close neighbour Ireland.”

On BBC’s Thought for the Day last Monday, however, I heard a bishop say that the presence of the Irish Ambassador, demonstrating that former enemies could be reconciled, was what gave hope to the act of remembrance.

Well, it would be nice to believe there is hope of peace among mankind. But on the eve of an event that might seem to support that view more strongly than the belated laying of a wreath came a chilling assessment of where we stand now. Ahead of celebrations marking the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, former Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev, who ordered the guards to remain at their posts as the wall came down, warned: “The world is on the brink of a new cold war. Some are saying it’s already begun.”

He went further. Accusing the West of “triumphalism”, mirrored, he claimed, in Nato expansion and intervention in Syria and Iraq, he said: “Europe is becoming an arena of political upheaval, of competition for the spheres of influence, and, finally, of military conflict.”

“Peace guttering down to war,” as the poet Cecil Day Lewis put it years ago. Except that we’ve never really had true, settled peace. And who, apart from that Thought-For-The-Day Bishop, believes we ever will?

FUNNY thing, fame. Just a couple of days after the death of Acker Bilk triggered a blaze of publicity, the death of another British jazzman, equally as good, if not better, than Acker, was quietly noted. Brian Lemon, who died aged 77, was a pianist of great elegance and impeccable taste. He was the first choice to accompany visiting American top liners, including King of Swing Benny Goodman and Harry (“Sweets”) Edison, the trumpeter heard on many Frank Sinatra records. Another US luminary, cornettist Ruby Braff, praised him as “wonderful.”

Linking Acker and Lemon was not only jazz but a love of cricket – “always a sign of a true artist and gentleman,” observed the critic Benny Green. Going back a generation, Sid Phillips, for my money Britain’s best-ever jazz clarinettist (his band was a favourite of Princess Margaret incidentally) was another lover of the summer game.

AT last – the Government is waking up to the scale of Britain’s litter problem. “Littering should be as socially unacceptable as drink driving,” boldly declares an official document. So perhaps we’ll see an end to litter dropping often quoted as the most minor of crimes. As the Government finally realises, there’s scarcely anywhere not disfigured by the stuff.