Well, that went well. Saddam Hussein has been executed with much dignity, the weapons of mass destruction have been made safe and Iraq is now in the hands of a well organised government such as you would find in Sweden. So, seeing as everything is tickety-boo in downtown Basra, we can now turn our attention to Afghanistan.

To be honest, this isn’t going very well at all. In fact, in the past 15 months our boys have fired 2.7m bullets. That’s 250 an hour. And still the Taliban keep coming in their flip-flops and Toyotas.

I popped over there for a couple of days last weekend and sadly I didn’t get to the front line. Partly this was due to logistics. Mainly, though, it’s because I am an extreme coward.

I suspect, however, that if I had gone the chaps would have been fine. Obviously, if I were in the army, I would volunteer for postal duties - in Scotland, preferably. But real army people like fighting. It’s what they’re trained to do, and loosing off 6,000 rounds a day, to them, is just a job.

My heart goes out instead to the thousands of backroom boys I met. Their life, far from the fighting, behind the blast-proof walls and the razor wire and the guard dogs and the sentries, is about as horrible as it’s possible to imagine. Unless you work in the Nigerian sewers.

Some are based at Camp Bastion, in the middle of the desert. The view is grey. You look over a vast grey camp with grey buildings to the grey concrete walls and beyond to the grey desert that blends into the dust-choked grey sky. There is no green. There is no yellow. There is no relief.

And of course, this being the army, everything has to be done at o’crikey o’clock. You never hear anyone in the forces say: “I thought we’d leave at 11ish.” Everything happens at three in the morning.

And at night it’s cold. Bitterly, numbingly cold. So cold that even the Geordies roll their sleeves down.

Happily the tents have heaters, which sounds lovely. But annoyingly the heaters in question have only two settings: “off” and so “on”, you could bake a bloody potato in there.

If you’re stationed at Kandahar you get a proper prefab building and the bedrooms have proper fan heaters that suck dust from the outside and shoot it into the room with such vigour that soon it sets off the smoke alarm.

Yup. Even though this is a full-on war, with Apache helicopter gunships and everything, you are not allowed to smoke indoors because it’s bad for your health. Also no vehicle is permitted to enter the battlefield - and I’m not joking - unless it meets EU emissions regulations.

I should mention at this point the lavatory doors, which someone erected four inches from the bowl. This is fine if you are Douglas Bader, but everyone else has to leave the door open. And I’m sorry but doing your number twos in plain view of everyone is only all right if you are a beast of the field.

Then you step into the showers, which are great. Except for one tiny detail. Water is in short supply so your allowance wouldn’t be enough even to baptise a baby. It isn’t anywhere near enough to wash a suicide bomber’s spleen out of your hair.

At night there is nothing to do. There is no gym, no cinema, no bar, no pool, no tennis court. There is, however, a shop where you can buy orange juice and coffee. Beer? Nope. It’s dry, even on Christmas Day.

So a typical day for the soldiers who keep the frontline troops fed, watered and armed is: get up. Chisel ice from your nose. Defecate in front of your mates. Shower your left foot. Walk to office. Do work. Walk to cookhouse. Walk to tent when tired. Repeat seven days a week.

And it’s bloody hard work. Every day the planes and the trucks are bringing in kit and you’ve got to sort it while trying not to wonder why someone back in Britain has sent 200 office desks with no drawers, 20,000 pairs of chef’s trousers and - get this - 2,000 jars of cockles. Any guns today? No. Just cockles.

The Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, meanwhile, spend their days scurrying into the badlands to retrieve trucks and tanks that have been blown to smithereens by bombs. To judge by the sheer volume of wrecked machinery in their yard, they do this a lot, and it’s not easy hauling stuff that weighs more than the moon over a desert while Johnny Taliban is taking pot shots all the time. Still, there’s always the promise of some lovely cockles if you get back.

And it’s not as if you’re out there for a couple of weeks. The tour of duty is six months, broken only by 14 days’ leave in Britain ... theoretically. Sadly, the RAF has only three Tristars and they all date from the time of Montgolfier, which means they break down often.

That means you can spend the first five days of your leave sitting on the tarmac in Kandahar and then five hours at the baggage reclaim in Brize Norton waiting for someone to open the door to the hold. Which has got stuck. Again.

Still, there was some cheery news from Gordon Brown when he dropped in for a 40-minute pat on the back the other day. He said simply that the forces would be in Afghanistan for another 10 years. And then he got on a plane and went home.

Ooh they were pleased. Six months a year for 10 years. That’s five years of their young lives in an alcohol-free sea of grey. This Christmas, then, spare them a thought.

Times Recommends

• Hysteria alert: Fab One tour starts
• Whodunnits? A cultural religion
• Prison works. So why won't we admit it?