Twenty-five years on, and many tours of Iraq and Afghanistan later, most of my contemporaries from RMA Sandhurst have left the British Army.

Some are still serving, a few at a very senior level. We still have a WhatsApp group and back in January, shortly after Nicolás Maduro was captured by troops from an elite US army unit and taken to a detention centre in New York to face narco-terrorism charges, a meme did the rounds. It showed a highly detailed pencil drawing of the hindquarters of a horse, which deteriorated into an amateurish impression of a midsection and finally into a playschool stick-man approximation of a smiling head and forelegs. Over the more accomplished part of the drawing, the caption read: “Plan to capture Maduro”; over the toddler’s scrawl, “Plan for the future of Venezuela”.

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