For me, it was always America. It was the land of the film heroes but it was also where the real heroes came from; the greatest generation, the men who saved Europe from the Nazis. America had the coolest food, the best attractions, moon landings, Abraham Lincoln, the Kennedys, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker and the Beach Boys. Its leaders somehow seemed hewn from taller trees. It was not embarrassed to believe in capitalism — and I thought all this even before I learnt to love the inspiring beauty of its national parks. I had a dream and it was the American dream.

And, of course, it was a dream. This same America that I grew up admiring toppled democratically elected regimes. It also regularly supported bad people and it did bad things.

Too much of its culture has been coarsening. Too often its politics owed more to All the President’s Men than The West Wing. It tolerated — still tolerates — appalling racial prejudice and saw its brightest lights extinguished by assassins. We have seen protracted indifference to mass shootings, mass surveillance and foreign policy that verged on cowboy arrogance.

But my America also saved and rebuilt Europe. It stood up to communism in its most aggressive form. It prospered on the ideals and generosity of Lady Liberty and projected a consistent optimism that things could be better.

It had heroic leaders, serious statesmen who, armed with unstoppable power, strived more often than not to use that power for good. It was the country that could be counted on to do the right thing even if, to paraphrase Churchill, it tried all the other things first. My America often fell woefully short of its ideals, but I never doubted those ideals.

The affection, gratitude even, I have always felt towards America perhaps explains what I can only describe at the moment as a feeling of grief. There is a real sense of loss, of being alone. It is a ludicrous view in so many ways. One nation can never entirely rely on another. And yet, until last week, the idea that America would not be there, ready to be counted in the fight for freedom, would have seemed absurd.

Perhaps, were I a little older, my view would have been more coloured by Vietnam or Chile but, even when I knew America was getting it wrong, even when it elected disagreeable presidents, it remained for me — as I suspect for most Britons — freedom’s last great hope. However much you disliked any given president, you knew the good America would prevail and correct itself, if correction were needed. Through all its darkest chapters — McCarthyism, Nixon — we knew, or at least I knew, that decency would eventually regain the upper hand.

Now it feels as if that has gone. For 70 years, we have thrived in the embrace of an America that believed in freedom and stood up to evil. We have seen America get it badly wrong but we have never seen it ready to retreat from the fight. For all its mistakes, only the hard left considered it the world’s greater evil. All those years later, we are still quoting the inspirational rhetoric of the Kennedy inaugural speech and Martin Luther King’s words from the march on Washington. So yes, it was a place of low politics and high ideals. Now it is just a place of low politics.

Perhaps this too shall pass. We have had bad men in the White House before. But the angst so many feel about Trump goes beyond his views, or fear that he might start a war. Many feared Ronald Reagan. But his was an optimistic country whereas Trump’s America is a dark, fearful and insular place. Reagan’s was an America that would stand tall in the world; right now, the home of the brave is crouched in a corner. And while the most extreme fears — the talk of fascism — will surely prove overblown, it seems remarkable even to consider America in such terms.

What remains is akin to a feeling of abandonment by a big brother on whom you always thought you could count. He could be wayward and too quick to throw his weight around but he was in your corner. And now perhaps he isn’t. I miss him already.