Let me tell you a story. A real story, of a real man. I will not point to a conclusion. I will not excavate morality or stuff like this. You read. The rest happens within your mind. It goes like this:

I had a bloke working for me when I ran a construction company. Half-Irish. Veteran. Two tours in Afghanistan before he left the army. I liked him from the first day.

He was mad for work. One morning I was running late to a job, a basement flat we were renovating. I had a delivery coming from the supplier and I rang him, told him to wait until I got there. By the time I arrived, he had already unloaded everything. A mountain of plasterboard, another mountain of multifinish, studs, and all sorts of other bits. All inside the house. On his own.

One day he was left alone on site. I forget why. The power went out. He had two square metres of tiling left in a bathroom. He finished it by the light of his phone. Rang me afterwards: "Mission accomplished." That was him. My kind of man.

Another day, we were walking somewhere and he saw a bloke in the street wearing something that looked like a military uniform. A civilian, wearing it as fashion or whatever it was. He lost it. Went straight at the man, shouting that it was not something to be worn by a nobody, that it meant something, that people died wearing it. I had to pull him back. It was not anger. It was something deeper than anger. That uniform was everything he was. Seeing it worn as a costume was like watching someone spit on a grave.

It ended badly for him. In a pub one evening, three men rubbed him the wrong way. I do not know what they said. Whatever it was, it hit the same nerve. They ended up in intensive care. He ended up in prison.

I felt sorry for him. I still do.