The other victims in Laos were 57-year-old American James Huston, two 19-year-old Australian women Holly Morton-Bowles and Bianca Jones and Danish friends Anne-Sofie Orkild Coyman, 20, and Freja Sorensen, 21. There is no ‘shoulders back, heads up' nowadays. No ‘keep calm and carry on'. Just ‘me, me, me' - as exemplified by research conducted earlier this year by The Times, in which just 11 per cent of Gen Z (young adults aged 18-27) said they would be willing to fight for their country.

How many of them will play their part in ridding the world of a true evil? How many will stand up for what's good and right, regardless of their own sacrifice? How many will still rise to their feet, two years shy of their 100th birthdays, to salute the marching band? The lack of self-awareness, the total entitlement, the utter selfishness: when you stop to think about it he's probably far more representative of modern British attitudes than his (comparatively) hard-working brother or father.

And don't get me wrong, it was wonderful to see so many people thronging the Mall, and all those street parties (in defiance of the gloomy weather). But for me, at any rate, the official celebrations were just tinged with… well, an inescapable sense of melancholy. They have little or no sense of national identity, ‘nation' being a dirty word. They are far more interested in identity politics, such as trans issues and questions of race and so-called white privilege.

The only thing they really seem to care about is how they come across on social media - a kind of ‘does my virtue look big in this?' mentality. And just as a reminder of the absolute agony he's suffering, his tin-eared idiot of a wife posted a picture of him and their two children with their backs to the camera, enjoying their not-so-hard-earned ‘freedom' in an idyllic garden. Watching the Red Arrows, seeing the faces of the crowd, listening to the stories of the veterans, I felt a sense of wistful longing for a nation, a people, a spirit and, above all, a clarity of purpose that I fear no longer exists.

And may never exist again. How they ever managed to go on to live anything even resembling a normal existence is a mystery to me. But somehow, they did. They knew the value of life, you see, understood how precious and precarious it is. They had survived: they owed it to those who did not to keep going. I have no doubt that his experience was by no means unusual. We wave our little flags today, pile the cream and jam on our scones, chink our teacups.

But what that generation endured is hard to fathom, decades on.