I once had the enviable opportunity to ask the Duke of Edinburgh, on air, whether he had regretted or resented giving up his cherished naval career just one year after getting his first command, simply because his father-in-law died and his wife had to be Queen.

His answer was to the effect that there is no point (off-air, it would have been “no bloody point”) in thinking about what might have been, because you just have to get on with it.

It wasn't a political answer. The peppery Duke doesn't do political answers, and has paid the critical price for that often enough. It was a statement of attitude, and one that has kept coming to mind through the past few days of celebration of his 60th wedding anniversary. The brisk energetic pragmatism of it seems to me ever more admirable, and ever more anachronistic. Life throws missiles at you: you duck, or catch them and throw them back, or pick them up and find some use for them. Life is an inexact science and time only works one way. What is, is; what happens, happens. Sometimes you can try to understand why it happened and draw lessons from it, but just as often there is no explanation at all, no useful lesson to be drawn. You just have to get on with it. Start from where you are.

It is a quality you often notice in these long, long marriages: that ability to adjust to changing circumstances. The times when marriages fail are often times of change. The first baby is born, and the mother gets preoccupied and plump; or perhaps no baby is born and the stress of IVF and arguments over adoption blows the whole thing to pieces. Maybe someone loses their job and gets depressed, or gets a new job and has to ask the spouse to move two hundred miles. A child causes trouble, or simply grows up and leaves, and a bout of depression and sense of empty-nested meaninglessness makes one partner tedious to live with.

Or perhaps another potential partner, without any of the problems, appears on the horizon, and one of you bolts for freedom (which often turns out not to be freedom after all). Change is hard to live with, but especially hard if you resent it and look back. It does no good at all to let yourself wish you were still in the Navy, or still young and sexy, or still living in the old house, or richer, or had younger, easier children and a partner with a full head of hair. It won't happen; a better future might, if you work on it. As for the past, it isn't going to change.

Worst of all is the tendency to look back in blame, and exist in a cloud of “if only” and “we was robbed”. Square the shoulders, get on with it. One of the most admirable examples of this I ever knew was a woman in a prosperous upper-middle-class family who, when her husband's firm suddenly went bust, looked the situation right in

the eye. While he flailed and wailed she got the house sold, cut up the credit cards and took a clutch of jobs — including cleaning the floor in a pub. She was full of jokes about it, and never blamed him. The

husband, alas, was less grown-up, retreated into a fantasy of his own continuing importance and finally bolted. But her route was the best one, the most honourable and hopeful.

The same applies to societies and nations. No bloody point grumbling, as the Duke would say, just get on with it. We have spent too much time recently in communal therapy, gazing at our own navel, apologising for the past or excoriating it. According to our position and views we love to blame every social ill on long-vanished nobs, mineowners, colonists, crusaders, slavers, boarding schools, hippies, architects, trendy teachers, Mrs Thatcher, polluters, whatever. It does no good. Soon it will even be time to stop looking back and blaming everything on Tony Blair, though the self-righteous staring-eyed interviews running on the BBC right now may delay our ability to let that one go.

Looking back to learn lessons is one thing; looking back to buttress a sense of inevitable gloom and decline is quite another. Historians have the job of showing the past to us clearly, so that we don't repeat mistakes, and that is an admirable thing to do. But history is never an excuse for limpness, self-pity and bad behaviour in the present. You have to start from where you are and make the most of it.

The Duke of Edinburgh, for all his irascibility and frequent lack of tact, has done this. Himself deprived of adventure and risk and seat-of-the-pants control of his life (and of the frigate HMS Magpie) he found lesser sources of adrenalin in sailing and carriage driving, and founded his awards scheme to enable the rising generations to feel that buzz and grow in confidence. Just turned 30, he was faced with a compulsory job for which he was not remotely suited by nature: a ceremonial and supporting role alongside a female constitutional monarch. Scoffers will say the Royal family is “pampered”, but if they are honest even scoffers must admit that no amount of Ruritanian titles, gold braid and valets could compensate for such loss of control and choice in their own life.

Yes, he married the job; but he had every right to expect twenty years of comparative freedom before the consort role kicked in. George VI was only 56, his father made it to 70 and his grandmother to 80. But the Duke refuses, to this day, to moan about it. And he remains married, smiling, interested, and faithful to the strange job we foisted on him. Raise a glass to him today.

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