On the 20th anniversary of the war there, I took a documentary crew to the Falkland Islands.

As a teenager when the war took place, it affected me profoundly, not least because then my father was my age when he fought in World War Two.

My mission was to take two veterans back to Mount Tumbledown, where they had fought in the last decisive battle of the war, and record their story.

We went up the mountain four times; twice in a 4x4, once on foot and once by helicopter. On the way back down on the footsore trek, laden like a pack horse with myriad tripods, lights and lenses, I was staggered to see a pile of the detritus of war, Argentinean sleeping bags, boots, shirts and first aid kits, lying discarded.

For an instant I thought about picking something up and taking it home, a helmet perhaps, as a souvenir of a conflict which had impacted on me so much.

But I quickly thought again; men had died here. The place where these artefacts belonged was right where they had lain for a score of years; I had no business interfering with history.

These were mores not shared by the collector who has just paid more than a quarter of a million pounds for the violin case belonging to the man who played as the Titanic sank, before perishing in the aftermath.

Ghoulish isn’t the word.

The fact that I was born in the pre-computer world is something which still makes me swell with pride.

Because my parents were avid readers, as a wee boy I was surrounded by magazines and books. I can recall lying on the living room floor, poring over copies of a broadsheet newspaper much bigger than me.

Even by those standards I may have been deemed to be geeky because I voluntarily read the Readers’ Digest, even when not in the waiting room for the doctor or dentist.

It had ‘Humour in Uniform’ and ‘Laughter: the Best Medicine' sections which hooked me and got me into the bigger stories.

So lucrative were early sales that its New York HQ was hung with van Goghs and Picassos. Sadly it has now gone the way of many other titles having shed so many readers it stopped publishing sales figures some years ago.

To quote one of its regular columns, ‘Life’s Like That.’

My first passage through the Channel Tunnel was on my way to the 1998 World Cup in France.

And although Scotland hasn’t qualified for another since, I have been fortunate enough to have transited the tunnel many more times.

It is a fantastic feat of engineering  designed to prevent us being out on a limb, an insular cluster of isolated islands on the periphery of the continent.

As I exited once again in France the other day, I felt incredibly positive to see vehicles of so many different nationalities heading hither and thither, carrying labour, mammon and ideas, and trains speeding from London to three capital cities replete with the same cargoes.

And on my train, I counted my lucky stars that I was warm, dry and safe beneath the same waves which have carried so many to their deaths in an ever-increasing tide of immigrants too many people were conned into thinking Brexit would stop.