I am reminded by this of a little story that I'd like to share.
The last 'family' holiday my mother dragooned me into was a visit to Paris with her, my old man and my sister. I must have been about 17.
We stayed at a hotel just near the Arc de Triomphe and did all the usual touristy things.
One evening, in the bar, the old man (who'd been a citizen soldier in the Western Desert and Italy) got into conversation with two other tourists of the same age as him. This was in about 1969 so he'd have been about 63 - about my age now. The other two tourists, one a German bloke and the other an American were about the same age and discovered that they had also been in the Western Desert and Italy. Things went well from then on. Their respective wives went to bed. They got stuck into the Kummel.
My mother knocked on my door at some ungodly hour and asked me to go down to the bar to find out how things were.
By that time the three of them had gone through at least two bottles of Kummel, and the overall opinion of the meeting was that WW2 was a bit of a mistake - and entirely the fault of the French anyway...
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