IT ALL started happening the day before. First one, two and then three beach chairs appeared on the roadside, followed by a blanket. Then a ground sheet. Next to it more chairs came, until before long the length of both sides of the main street of the Cape Cod seaside town was festooned in readiness.

The makeshift July 4 parade linear grandstand stayed in place overnight and not one of the chairs, blankets and groundsheets was moved.

Every last item remained exactly where its owner had left it, and no one felt they had to stay with their property to make sure it wasn’t disturbed. It just didn’t enter their heads to do so.

As dawn broke, people started to drift downtown with coffee and breakfast bagels, cool boxes full of bottles of water, wearing Uncle Sam hats and carrying Stars and Stripes flags.

In houses off the main street, family and friends gathered for early morning breakfast enhanced by offerings of Mimosas – Bucks Fizz to you and me – and Bloody Marys, the traditional celebratory drinks of Independence Day, before drifting off down the hill in readiness for the parade to begin.

By this time the crowds lining the street were six or seven deep and everyone was in a state of excited anticipation.

The sun shone, huge bunches of balloons danced overhead, red, white and blue banners hung from trees and buildings. Then in the distance came the intermittent sound of police sirens and two motorcycle cops hove into view, every buckle polished to a gleam, uniform shirt sleeves pressed to a knife edge, pristine white gloved hands gripping the handlebars of their bikes.

They looked so proud to be leading off their small town’s parade and they grinned self-consciously as the crowds cheered their arrival. Behind them the town’s police chief walked tall, then paused a while between his two officers to pose for pictures with excited children.

Only then did the parade begin in earnest. First came the police vehicles and fire trucks, deliberately at the head of the parade so they could quickly peel off in case they were called out to an emergency. Behind them came the local combat veterans, old soldiers and marines, some of them not so old, who had lost limbs or been otherwise injured in today’s wars.

If the sky above the main street had been covered in rafters they would have been blown off, such was the crescendo of cheers and applause that greeted them.

Quite spontaneously came the sound of the crowd singing God Bless America, every single voice knowing every single word of the prayer to music first written by Irving Berlin in 1918 and revised by him in 1938.

Then came the first of the floats pulled by gleaming trucks festooned in stars and stripes. One after another they passed by, each being rewarded by cheers and applause from the crowd.

On and on they came. More than an hour later the parade was still passing by and the crowd was still as enthusiastic as ever – not a bad effort for a small town with a year-round population of just 6,625.

And what makes it even more remarkable is that down the road other towns of similar size or even smaller were doing the same thing and celebrating their nation’s independence in exactly the same way.

Replicate that across all 50 states in the union, in which there are apparently 18,443 towns and cities, and it’s easy to see that Americans have a strong sense of national identity and why they cleave so much to their flag.

Love them or hate them, call it a form of arrogance if you will, but they have a profound belief in a nation that they see as enriched by diversity and preserved by unity. The country persistently heads up the top ten most patriotic countries in the world and only last week a poll revealed that one in three Americans consider themselves to be “extremely patriotic”.

Compare that to a nation – ours – that has never even made the top ten, where most of England’s population haven’t a clue when St George’s Day is or even what it’s supposed to represent, where local authorities refuse planning permission for people to erect flagpoles in their gardens, where the England flag is largely a prop for soccer fans and where the Union Flag is all too often seen as the preserve of political extremists.

No wonder some say they’re ashamed to be British.