WERE you among the estimated 720,000 protesters who joined the People’s Vote March in London on Saturday?

I wasn’t, but maybe you travelled to the capital to demand a vote on any Brexit deal the Prime Minister Theresa May agrees with the EU. Were you also angry at the result of the 2016 referendum? It follows, then, that you are also angry at the way the Brexit negotiations are going.

Presumably you wouldn’t have been angry at the referendum result if it had gone the way you wanted. You would have believed in the kind of democracy that means a majority vote prevails and not have deemed it a new kind of evil called “populism”, which although defined as “support for the concerns of ordinary people” has come to be regarded as a sinister new branch of neo-Nazism by those who believe the “ordinary people” who voted to Leave had nasty prejudices and hadn’t a clue what they were doing.

Perhaps you also think that a general election that doesn’t deliver the result you want should be held again…and again…and again until you get your way. It astonishes me that people are behaving in such a childish, spoilt way and feel so entitled to have what they want.

Young people particularly are outraged that the country voted to leave the EU. We were lied to, they shrieked after they didn’t get the result they wanted, regardless of the fact that information has never been so available and accessible as it is now, in this digital age where just about everything is available online.

They also conveniently forget that 36 per cent of their own generation didn’t bother to drag themselves down to the polling stations to actually vote, compared with only 22 per cent of those aged 55 and over who didn’t vote.

Given that younger people were more likely to vote Remain and older people to Leave, it probably swung the final result into Leave.

Yet there have been calls for both a second Referendum and for 16-year-olds to have the right to vote in it on the grounds that it’s their generation that will have to live with the consequences of leaving the EU.

Well, I’m sorry, but no, there shouldn’t be a second referendum when one has already been held and no,16-year-olds should not be able to vote because they simply aren’t mature enough to make such a decision.

Human brains don’t reach full maturity until the age of 25, and if 16-year-olds aren’t mature enough to do their own washing, make their own beds and empty the dishwasher without being asked, they are a long way from being mature enough to have the power to vote.

They haven’t yet lived in the real world, paying taxes and bills and holding down jobs and running their own lives.

Why should they be allowed to make decisions that affect the lives of their parents and their grandparents?

Yes, they will have to live with the consequences of the Leave vote for the greater part of their lives, but then my generation have had to live with the consequences of joining the EU, or the European Economic Community (EEC) as it was, back in 1975 without having any chance until 2016 to vote on our country’s membership of it during our adult lives.

I was nine years old in 1975 and will be nearly 53 next March when Britain will leave the EU, so my country has belonged to it for the vast majority of my life.

I mostly remember the bad things about the EEC because they made the headlines throughout my childhood with the butter mountain, milk lakes and beef mountains that were the consequence of the Common Agricultural Policy, which created gluts of food that went to waste, controversial fishing rights and quotas that decimated our fishing industry, and silly pointless rules about the shape of bananas and apples, leaving misshapen fruit to rot and producers out of pocket.

It was my mother who explained to me, when I was older, the deeper reasons for the creation of the EEC.

It was an attempt to diffuse old enmities after the First and Second World Wars with the aim of avoiding a third one, and to bring European countries closer together as a community with a common policy.

In that sense, I think the EEC/EU has done its job and now, more than 70 years after the end of the Second World War, we have voted to leave it.

My generation accepted the referendum result to join it more than 40 years ago because mature eligible voters made their legitimate decision.

New generations need to accept the legitimate decision of mature eligible voters who have experienced living within the EU for far longer than they have to leave it.

It’s up to them now to make the best of it.