The Only Really Serious Post I’ll Ever Do.

65 years ago thousands of unbelievably brave men and women landed in France.

By common agreement, nothing brings what they did to life better than this:

I don’t know about you, but I’d have just wet my pants and hoped it all went away before I had to stand in front of a bullet.

Fortunately, those guys didn’t.

They went through something that makes all this prissy nonsense about the credit crunch look absolutely pathetic.

They really did their bit.

And now it’s your turn.

This summer, the surviving soldiers from Operation Overlord are going to return to France to commemorate D-Day, probably for the last time.

And we’re going to pay for that to happen.

The Overlord List details every one of those soldiers, and you have the privilege of being able to sponsor as many as you like for their return to those beaches. You can find someone from your area and raise the money to send him or her across.

Get together with friends and divide the cost. Organise a pool tournament and make the prize a sponsored veteran of the winner’s choice. Hold a 1940s Swing night, like the one I’ve just been to, and raffle what you can to help them.

Although The Independent are publicising this campaign, I found out about it through Trevor Beattie, who is really driving it. He told me that Richard Branson could easily find all the money himself, but that’s not the point. The point is that we owe these men everything and the chance to help them commemorate what they’ve done is something we should all be able to share, so that we can say thank you.

So check the website, sponsor a veteran and do something that is purely good.

This opportunity is a rare and beautiful thing.