We all have anniversaries. Not necessarily big ones (such as the First World War, which dominated last year and will be commemorated throughout its centenary, but we all have a birthday, or a work anniversary or even ones which celebrate the start of a new relationship. 2015 has been a year to remember on the world stage, with Magna Carta now 800 years old and today seen as a cornerstone of British democracy. The Battle of Waterloo took place 200 years ago, and who knows how the world would be today should the ‘damned close-run thing’ have ended differently.
How often has someone mentioned that such-and-such an event happened so many years ago and you’ve said ‘You must be kidding.’? Barings Bank collapsed twenty years ago, worth many millions of pounds then, and now many of us have never heard of it. Anniversaries give us a chance to think back to the bad times, whether to mourn those lost during the tragedy at Heysel Stadium in Brussels thirty years ago, or to acknowledge the death of the iconic Winston Churchill (who died in 1965). By fixing a date to a certain event it gives us a reason to stop and remember those lost and in many cases, as many memorials to soldiers of the First World War will remind you, to remember why it happened and what we gained.
And so in that way, anniversaries are also a chance to celebrate how far we have come. Parliament, which arguably first met 750 years ago, is now a fact of life, and the last woman hanged in the UK was sixty years ago – not as long ago as some might like to think. Anniversaries give us a chance to look back at the first use of antiseptic (via lint dipped in carbolic acid) 150 years ago and realise how it has evolved into our current medical practices. Did you know that driving tests were only compulsory eighty years ago? We can laugh at our past foolishness, such as at the pictures of those old-fashioned mobile phones, the first call of which was made thirty years ago, but it is always worth remembering that whatever we have now developed from somewhere and our descendants will probably look back on us and have a good laugh too.
In this way anniversaries need not always be sombre and to mark a tragedy. They are also an opportunity to celebrate our success, be it as personal as a silver wedding anniversary or as (arguably) nationwide as the first episode of EastEnders thirty years ago. But, of course, it can also be bittersweet, such as VE Day (seventy years ago) celebrating the end of the Second World War, which can never be remembered without those lost in it, or the evacuation of Dunkirk five years before that, when little, almost insignificant, ships helped save thousands of Allied soldiers.
Looking back also gives us a chance to look forward. Thinking back to Waterloo, with Napoleon defeated by a coalition of nations, can give us hope that different nations can put aside their differences and unite for a common cause. And marking the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet Red Army seventy years ago means that the horror can never be forgotten, with the hope that it never will happen again. It is often stated that history repeats itself, and so it would be foolish to relive our mistakes by forgetting the experience of all those before.
Because surely that is the most important role of an anniversary. It is so we do not forget.