Last week, on a Radio 4 show called The Moral Maze, a woman said that all men are wife-beaters and warmongers, and that a boy brought up by women is bound to become a better balanced human being.

Maybe this is so. But he is also bound to spend too much time on the telephone talking about nothing in particular. What’s more, he will be late for the start of all TV films and will therefore have no clue what’s going on, he will read books in which nothing ever happens, he may well turn out to be a teensy bit gay, and worst of all he will grow up never having seen an F-15 fighter jet loop the loop at an air show.

He may well have seen a B-1 bomber make a full-bore, combat-power takeoff, but only through the fence at Greenham Common. And that means he won’t have been in the company of someone who agreed that, yes, it’s much prettier and far more amazing than anything from the dreary and pointless mind of Jane Austen.

Last weekend I took my boy child to the Royal International Air Tattoo at RAF Fairford. This is not something that would have happened if he’d been brought up by a heavily breasted feminist with greasy hair.

Sadly, we didn’t quite make it in time for the Red Arrows, which meant we ended up watching their routine from the side of the road a few miles away. Strangely, it was much better.

Of course, the normal display is designed to look choreographed and excellent from one side of the airfield, where the audience is standing. It’s designed so you go “ooh” and “wow” at all the carefully rehearsed passing manoeuvres.

But if you look at it from three miles away, on the other side of the airfield, it’s like looking at the underside of a tapestry. It looks like a mess, like a selection of people with Parkinson’s disease have climbed into their jets after getting very, very drunk. You don’t go “ooh” or “wow”. You find yourself shouting: “Jesus Christ. They’re going to f****** hit each other.” And diving for cover in the hedge. Or was that just me? After that, the other team displays looked a bit weak, if I’m honest. Oh, except for the Swiss. Perhaps because they never have to train for any actual combat, their formation flying was as precise as their watches. The Jordanians weren’t bad either. Sadly, the Israelis couldn’t make it. They sent a note saying they were a bit busy.

I’d say the highlight of the day went to the Russians, who turned up with a Power Ranger fighter jet called the MiG-29, which can fly — and I’m not making this up — backwards and upside down at the same time. It can also stop, fall from the sky like a leaf and then tear over your head so low that it gives you a new parting at 500mph, while making a noise so immense it very nearly undid the Duke of Kent’s tie.

It was an epic spectacle, as magical as anything you’ve ever seen in the West End and as loud as anything you ever heard at Knebworth. And what made it even more breathtaking is that there were no wires and no special effects. What you were watching was Johnny Russian spending 15 minutes idly tearing up the laws of physics.

Next up were the Americans, who have nothing in their armoury that can even get close to the lunacy of the MiG. It was like giving Paul Daniels a white rabbit and putting him on stage after the Cirque du Soleil.

Can this have been deliberate on the part of the show’s organisers? To bring the Americans on after the main event. To humiliate them a little bit. I do like to think so.

It turned out, however, that the Americans are quite capable of humiliating themselves. While the F-15 was whizzing about, a USAF staff sergeant came on the public address system to tell us all what was going on. Unfortunately he’d brought exactly the same script he uses back at home . . .

“You are watching with pride,” he began and was wrong immediately. I wasn’t watching with pride. I was watching with a Pimm’s.

The rest of his spiel was like listening to the fingernail express screeching to a halt on a blackboard the size of Alaska. The F-15, he said, has patrolled the skies for 30 years protecting “this great nation’s way of life from the tyranny of terrorism, blah blah blah”. It was even accompanied by that swelling one-cal soft rock music that causes visitors at American air shows to rise to their feet and weep.

I looked around at the RAF bigwigs with whom I was sitting and, amazingly, none of them was openly vomiting. Mostly they were smiling the smile you might give your boss if you’ve got him round for dinner and he’s just made an inappropriate remark about your wife’s panty line.

My boy child wasn’t. He was beaming the beam of someone for whom the meaning of life had just become clear. He spends most of his life with two sisters, a mother, a granny, a nanny and a housekeeper. Even our dogs are girls. And yet here he was watching an F-15 climb with its burners lit from ground level to 17,000ft in 11 seconds. With his dad. And he loved it.

So here’s a tip. It’s the Farnborough air show this weekend. If you’ve got a son, go. If you haven’t, go upstairs and make one.

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