I don't know, there's just something about the sale of Victoria Cross for around six hundred thousand Canadian dollars, around four hundred thousand pounds, that makes me uncomfortable. It is only a piece a metal and it's not as if it's the guy who actually won it that's being forced to part with it because he's hit hard times. The VC in question was won by Canadian tank commander Major David Currie during the Normandy Campaign in August 1944. The notoriously modest Currie always insisted until his death that the medal really belonged to all the men who served under his command as they tried to staunch a massive German retreat they stood in the path of. His widow sold the medal to a Canadian collector. I don't know what he paid for it. But we do know it has just been resold to a British collector. I don't know why the medal was sold this time around or why the British collector wanted it so much. I can understand why the widow might have sold it. Acts of bravery do not pay the rent. Though, if she took her husband's words to heart, she would have tracked down all Currie's men and shared the proceeds of the sale with them. I presume the medal was sold for more than the Canadian collector paid for it. Maybe that's what's troubling me. Why, I ask myself, should someone with enough spare cash to buy a medal profit by another man's courage? Or in this case, according to the recipient himself, other men's courage? Pieces of medal are one of way of recognising outstanding performance in the service of the nation. But perhaps a decent lifetime pension might be better. Towards the end of Queen Victoria's reign as far too many rank-and-file winners of the award that bears her name went to paupers' graves, a decent pension was instituted - somewhere between fifty and seventy-five pounds a year.  Last I heard, the pension, officially an annuity, was just over fourteen hundred pounds a year.