Sadly the days when we bit the upper lip and saluted/doffed our headgear in respect of the dead are no more, but like Topsy the Wootton Bassett experience has grown and grown from its initial beginnings when a funeral cortege just happened to go down the High Street as the local branch of the British Legion were rehearsing, to what happens today.
Sometimes it's difficult to distinguish between a genuine outpouring of emotion and respect and a sort of ghoulish theme park experience attracting visitors to participate in what has turned out to be flower-chucking, Diana-inspired media circus - as we see on the telly each time a C-17 returns the fallen to Lyneham and the cortege slows down to walking pace as it passes through WB.
Personally and being ex-RAF, I hate overt signs of grief.
As Voltaire said:
"We owe respect to the living; to the dead we owe only truth."