After his GCSEs last month, my eldest son, who is 16, headed off to Glastonbury with a bunch of friends. From Glastonbury, they went on to Cornwall. I’d written out a cheque to a backpackers’ hostel some weeks previously, smiling to myself at my memories of InterRailing round Europe when I was 17. My son is a keen surfer, so I assumed he was going to hang out with mates, catch some waves, lie in the sun. When I asked him what he actually planned to do, he said he wasn’t entirely sure, but that all of the above were probabilities - “and, you know, a bit of partying”.

Anyway, off he went to Newquay. He stayed in touch via text. I called him at one point to pass on a bit of news and noted that it was early afternoon and he didn’t sound entirely sober. I briefly considered a lecture, but then remembered (with vivid, perfect recall) exactly how it felt to be 16 in the sunshine, with your exams behind you and the summer stretching goldenly ahead. I thought, he’s not an imbecile, he’ll be fine, and told him that as it was baking hot, he needed to keep drinking water.

And then I opened up a paper last week and read that two boys - children, really - had died in Newquay at the time when my son was there. The town, to its shame and unbeknown to me, styles itself as “party central” and is specifically a destination for post-GCSE celebrants, because the booze is cheap and nobody asks for ID (besides, fake IDs are two a penny). Andrew Curwell, 18, was found dead at the foot of the cliffs at Great Western beach. Paddy Higgins, 16, plunged 70ft to his death from the same cliffs; his body was found on Tolcarne beach. A third teenager fell and broke his neck, but survived.

This all happened in the space of eight days: ordinary boys, with their whole life ahead of them, exams behind them, going on their first parentless holiday, and coming home in a coffin. It doesn’t bear thinking about: it makes you want to lock up your children until they’re about 35. It is properly heartbreaking.

I showed the article to my son, who pointed at a photograph and said, “We were on that beach.” He squinted at the images of the dead boys and said, “We probably hung out.” My smuggery about communication and “being open with each other” quickly fell by the wayside and I made him read the article. “Horrible,” he said. “But no one should drink that much.”

At a loss, I made him swear never to mix intoxication with bodies of water, and told him, for the nth time, the story about his father’s schoolfriend who’d gone to a post-A-level party, got drunk and jumped in the pool. The pool was empty. The friend is quadriplegic. Then I went and had a cup of tea, feeling shaken. Two children, who could have been my children, your children, anyone’s children, dying on a Cornish beach on a summer’s evening, in the name of “partying”. There will be others.

Fast forward a few days, and another heartrending story about doomed youth. Private Robbie Laws and Private Danny Eaglesfield, both 18, were friends and had joined up together when they were 16. Danny has a baby face and is only 5ft 4in. Robbie was killed on their first outing, when a Taliban rocket-propelled grenade hit his vehicle. Danny was injured. Last Thursday, he planned to say some words of tribute before his best friend’s Union flag-draped coffin was loaded onto an RAF aircraft and sent home along with the bodies of four other young men who have died in Helmand over the past few days. Middle-class boys fall off cliffs to their deaths; working-class boys die in Afghanistan.

Dying in the service of your country is not the same as dying because you lost your way in the dark or got drunk and fell off a cliff; being a trained soldier (by which I also mean trained to kill other people’s sons), Robbie Laws will have a military funeral. The parents of Paddy Higgins faced an equally sad task: releasing photographs of their son drinking two hours before he fell to his death. Calling on Newquay to clean up its act, his stepmother said: “Newquay is advertised as the party capital of the UK for teenagers. To 16-year-olds, partying means getting drunk . . . We know Paddy was sold this round of drinks. He was so proud that he had just bought drinks for all the mates that he loved and his friend wanted to capture the moment.”

Danny Eaglesfield, meanwhile, e-mailed Robbie Laws’s mother. “She told me how proud she was of Robbie, and how she wished all of us left here in Afghan good luck and a safe return home. I told her that when we joined the unit in Belfast, and did not know anyone else in the unit, Robbie and I looked out for each other. We looked after each other right to the end.”

Despite the different ways in which these children met their appalling, untimely ends, what links their stories is the terrible sense of grief and waste. Children aren’t supposed to die in the pursuit of fun, and one might have hoped the age of cannon-fodder had passed, too.

Both stories have an almost unbearable resonance about them. Dying because you may have drunk too much is senseless, yet it could - and does - happen to anyone. Dying because of wobbly decisions made by governments doesn’t, to me, make much sense either.

There is something unbearably poignant about young men killed in action - young men whose names we barely register on the news, young men whose names are read out in parliament, young men whose coffins we might see driven down a country lane. Robbie Laws’s parents will try to make sense of their loss by focusing on the nobility of an “honourable” death and of “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”. Paddy Higgins’s parents will live forever in the knowledge that their child’s death came about as a result of overindulgence.

But no matter how stupid or noble the death - broken limbs on a beach, a coffin draped with the Union flag - the grieving families remain robbed of a child. There was a time when I believed, like the most simple-minded imbecile, that the hard bit of parenting was the early years - the broken nights, the anxieties over vaccinations, the bumps and grazes. Pffft. Tell that to the parents of the boys and girls crowding out Newquay this weekend. Tell it to the parents of “our boys” in Helmand.

+ Is the idea that older people know more stuff about to become extinct? I ask in relation to the esteemed choreographer Arlene Phillips, 66, being booted off the panel for Strictly Come Dancing in favour of the pretty singer Alesha Dixon, 30, who won the show in 2007.

Phillips knows her onions and has had a long and illustrious career as a top choreographer. Dixon has a lovely smile and used to be in the girl band Mis-Teeq. The male judges, who all remain in place, are aged 44, 53 and 65.

The BBC says Phillips will be redeployed to The One Show, where she will comment on what’s going on on Strictly. I’m sure she’s pleased not to have been put out to pasture completely, but it’s hard to see how this wouldn’t be viewed as a massive demotion. Dixon has clearly been hired as eye-candy to appeal to a younger demographic, but the problem is that she doesn’t know anything really about dancing.

Except, clearly, the Beeb doesn’t see this as being a problem at all. The implication is that the younger demographic doesn’t give a hoot about knowledge as long as presenters are pert and decorative. Not only is this depressing, but it is also quite extraordinarily patronising.

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