The motorcade rolling out from L.F. Wade past the Swizzle Inn on Thursday evening looked, on my phone screen in Turin, exactly like Bermuda at its best. Union Jacks and Bermuda flags going at the same time. People cheering on the verge.

And, this is the part worth pausing on, a genuine cross-section of the island doing the cheering. Not just one demographic, not just one generation. I know not everyone is thrilled, and the “well, who cares” camp is real and entitled to its view. But a fair temperature check suggests most Bermudians see His Majesty's visit as a net good.

Like everyone, I have also seen the pothole jokes. No wonder the roads are finally getting paved, etc. But growing up in Bermuda, weren't you always told to tidy up before family came over? If not, then either you had no family visiting, or your parents weren't strict enough. The island has done exactly what it was raised to do.

I should be honest here: I am watching this from Italy, not standing on the apron at L.F. Wade or at Government House. There is a small ache in that. But the pride outweighs the wistfulness. Pride in the soldiers and officers of the Royal Bermuda Regiment who are front and centre this weekend. I served alongside many of them.

Conscription ended a decade ago, and the Regiment has been an all-volunteer force since. But long before that change, and certainly since, the Regiment has been a platform on which Bermudians have demonstrated excellence and, in many cases, found a route to social mobility they might not otherwise have had. That is not an argument I need to win on the page. It is merely something I know to be true.

Ten years ago this summer, I stood at the Thiepval Memorial for the centenary of the Battle of the Somme. I was there as a descendant of Corporal John Walter Drew, Bermuda Militia Artillery, who served with the Bermuda Contingent, Royal Garrison Artillery, my great-great-uncle. Standing next to me was Alex Conyers, a fellow Bermudian whose own great-uncle had been killed in action at the Somme on 18 August 1916.

I was in full uniform. Alex was in Bright Pink Bermuda shorts. Dan Snow of the BBC stopped us for an interview and asked, gamely, whether the shorts were the national formal dress of Bermuda. Alex told him they absolutely were. I told Snow that being there as a serving soldier, a hundred years on, was about “bringing the past into the present and carrying it forward into the future”. I believed it then. I believe it now. Ceremony is the mechanism that makes our connection to forebears who sacrificed disproportionately, for an island this size, vivid rather than abstract.

Which brings me to a quiet hope. Work has been under way for several years to see the battle honours of the Bermuda Militia Artillery and the Bermuda Volunteer Rifle Corps recognised on the Royal Bermuda Regiment's colours. How far that work has progressed I do not know. But this is not a political demand dressed up as a request. It is a veteran's wish for a small act of recognition that would mean a great deal to the Regiment's identity and its line back to those who came before. For a monarch, a small thing. For the Regiment, an enormous one.

The Crown's real utility, for those of us without inherited sentiment towards it, is as a vehicle. A platform. The Regiment consistently produces people who go on to lead, in the civil service, in business, in public life. The pageantry is the visible part. The platform is the part that lasts.

So, when I scroll through the photographs this weekend, the faces I am looking for are not the King's. They are the soldiers on the apron and along the route, some of whom I trained, some of whom trained me, all of whom are standing where I would otherwise be standing. They are the ones doing the work the cameras will not quite capture.

The motorcade will leave tomorrow. The flags will come down. The potholes, in time, will return. But the young men and women in uniform this weekend will still be there, and so will the institution that gave them a platform to stand on. That is the part of this visit I am proudest of. That is the part worth keeping.

· Paolo Odoli is a Captain in the Royal Bermuda Regiment, currently on leave of absence in Italy.