How much would you have bet me if, a couple of years ago, I’d said that we would live to see the day when it would be illegal to enter a bank or a post office, unless your face was covered by a mask?

Unbelievable, was it not? Yet it is true; it happened; it is (now) historically accurate. With a bit of foresight, I could have won a fortune.

I ask because, as we move inexorably towards what we should be calling the Second Cold War, it occurs to me that mine is the first generation of my entire ancestry that hasn’t been involved in a war. True, I was shot at, personally, during the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland and I was shelled (also personally – I was the only person moving about) in the Middle East but we were not allowed to call either of those unpleasantnesses a ‘war’.

But the (First) Cold War was real enough. And I remember it well. We, East and West, were teetering on the verge of nuclear annihilation of the civilised (?) globe.

If my (great) grandchildren ask what it was like to be alive in it, I shall tell them how we lived under the threat of an attack in the knowledge that we would have (at most) four minutes warning to get underneath a table or a staircase as our best chance for surviving a nuclear explosion.

Trust me: I am your grandfather; I have not made that up. It is actually what the government advised us to do.

Honestly.

People started hoarding, like they do: there wasn’t a roll of toilet paper or a can of baked beans left in the shops.

Only slightly closer to reality, as a front-line reporter, I was summoned to the Ministry of Defence to be kitted out with NBC (nuclear, biological and chemical warfare) protection gear, in my size, or close enough, dressed in which it would be near-impossible to hear what people were saying and totally impossible to write a shorthand note.

So, if and when I interpreted the simmering Cold War to be approaching boiling point, my rapid reaction would have started with a visit to Whitehall to ask them to find and issue my kit, before speeding off to Heathrow to buy a ticket (if it was still open), or to RAF Brize Norton in deepest Oxfordshire, to bum a lift in a Hercules.

I happened to be in West Berlin on the day the Wall came down- Revel Barker

But, since nothing came of it, that wouldn’t be much of a war story for the kids. After all, I never heard a nuclear bomb dropped in anger.

On the other hand, I happened to be in West Berlin on the day the Wall came down,  thus, finally ending what we didn’t think about referring to as the First Cold War because nobody could conceive there ever being a second one. And that would have been VB (Victory in Berlin) Day. November 9, 1989, since you obviously need to ask.

That was a day of pure joy and genuine celebration with West Berliners hearing the news and flocking in their hundreds to the scene. Young folk sat astride the Wall close to Checkpoint Charlie, one leg inside what, a few hours earlier, had been the Killing Zone. Some, a bit older, with flowers in their hair, came to play guitars and sing kum-byah at the foot of it while others brought sledgehammers and picks and started laying into the Wall with a genuine vengeance.

And then a cohort of townsfolk arrived with brooms and shovels and rubbish bags, sweeping up the lumps of reinforced concrete as they flew, hammered out of the whitewashed Wall. How Germanic, I remember thinking; how Berlinerisch!

Next morning, as I sat drinking coffee on the Ku’damm, those same civic-minded people came along the pavement with their rubbish bags. “Want to buy a souvenir? An actual piece of the famous Berlin Wall?”

That’s what this Granddad did during the Last Nastiness, I’ll tell them: saw it through from start to finish.

But does the war against COVID maybe justify being called a real War?

In which case, I’ll have the story about banks and legally required masks, which would be a far better, and more memorable, one-liner.