In adversity, there can be utterly lovelines. With my Mum in hospital with a broken hip, I've had to move in to be full-time carer for my Dad. I love my parents, but this is the most time I've spent with him in years. And we've had the old photos out, just me and him.

Photos from his time in Malaya in the late 1950s, in the RAF. My 80-year-old Dad as a 19-year-old, swigging Tiger Beer, diving off cliffs, leaning out of an aeroplane above the jungle dropping leaflets into the trees ordering "insurgents" to surrender.

We found the medal he was given, along with the rest of his squadron, by the Malayan government for taking part in these missions, and we sat with my Mum's laptop and managed to find the date of the ceremony, which he'd long forgotten: April 1960.

He's told me about being given a rifle and 4 bullets in case his train to a jungle fort was hijacked by bandits, about doing a Ouija board in the remains of Changhi prison, about remote Malayan villages still flying the flag of Japanese occupation, 14 years after the war ended.

It has been an education and a privilege, and I guess what I'm saying is: if you love your parents, spend time with them while you can and listen to their stories. I wish I'd done it more, but I'm making up for it now.

Oh, and the Changi Prison Ouija Board story is terrifying. When my Dad and his friends asked "Is there anybody there?", expecting a few giggles and nothing more, the glass zoomed out of control all over the board, then flew off the table. 850 POWs died there during WW2.

I can keep going. By 1961 he was in Oman, still with the RAF, and was put on full alert the night the Berlin Wall went up, as it was fully expected to spark the start of WW3. I quote: "We couldn't have been anywhere better - nobody was going to bother bombing that bloody place".

Now very embarrassed that such a popular thread has so many typos in its first post. "Utterly lovelines" indeed. FFS. UTTER LOVELINESS.