I am sure that this is a generation thing. You are either "AD"(after Diana) or "BD". If the latter, you would not dream splashing condolences about the demise of someone you had never met in a public forum. It smacks of exhibitionism. And if you did know the deceased well enough to want to intrude on his family's private grief, then why not take up pen and paper and address a letter to his CO for onward transmission if he thought fit. He would be aware of the emotional state of the next of kin. And it need not take much longer than posting on Prune.
Some chap earlier on thought that by posting here you would be communicating your respects to the deceased. Surely, if there is a life hereafter, you would not need a PC to divine the thoughts of the living?
IMHO the Mawkish Tendency in our society is getting quite out of hand. I thought the armed services would be the last bastions defending emotional continence and decent restraint. But it seems the cause is lost. And on a different but parallel topic we now seem to be under pressure to support the apointment of umpteen more assistant coroners to reduce the "backlog" of inquests on repatriated deceased service people. This is a new form of "outdoor relief" for lawyers who are totally unqualified to investigate any military casualty. In my day they would have been invited to go forth and multiply. In two world wars good men died in their hundreds of thousands without any form of inquiry - either military or civil - and their beloved had to come to terms with their grief (achieve "closure" in the current psychobabble) with only a form letter from the War Office. My poor old mother lost both her brothers in 1916 in the army and her first fiancé in the RFC in 1917. And yet she managed to get herself together enough to be a winner in the scramble for husbands in her generation in the 1920s. Can you inagine how long the Prune condolence threads would be (and how large the Corps of Assistant Coroners would be) if we had to suffer carnage again on the scale of 1914-18 (or Bomber Command 1939-45)?
I expect I shall be reviled for being a brutally insensitive and fascist thug descended from Ghengis Kahn. If so, I won't give a XXXX, because I have very quickly been losing empathy with this forum.
Well said, Moggie!