Yet another rainy day in London. There was some promise of sunlight for a few minutes in the afternoon but that simmered down to false hope as dusk was drawing near. You knew there was a storm coming – in fact, they had issued a gale warning today – if you look in the sky and follow where the clouds were headed to. Although the sunset brought in some colors with it, it was cloudy and eery for the most part. At sunset, I took some shots in Trafalgar Square and  headed down to the nearby Golden Jubilee Bridges at which time the rain fell hard. Luckily, it stopped after a few minutes, and I picked up where I had left off.

Despite the nasty weather, I’m still glad I went to Trafalgar Square today. It’s probably only once a year I’d get a shot like this with the poppies. Today, England celebrates Armistice Day. The entire week, I’ve been seeing people wearing poppy ribbons on their lapels, and today at Trafalgar Square, paper poppy wreaths and flowers are strewn into the fountains. In several parts of London, at the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” people stopped for a couple of minutes for a moment of silence. Even in the always busy streets of Trafalgar Square, cars, buses and cabs hushed to a stop when traffic lights turned red.

Here’s my take on this solemn occasion, with a little help from the poppies and the weather.

For more than 90 years Britons have fallen silent at 11a.m. every Armistice Day in remembrance of the day that marks the anniversary of the end of the WWI. The First World War armistice came into effect at 11a.m. on 11 November 1918, the "eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month". Armistice or Remembrance Day is also known as Poppy Day. The poppy is a symbol of remembrance which is said to have started during WWI when Flanders, the western part of Beligum saw the most concentrated and bloodiest fighting. There was complete devastation and a lot of lives lost and the only living thing that survived were the poppies. The poppies - flowering each year with the coming of warm weather brought life and hope to those still fighting.