Top Gear on Sunday night, watched by everyone and their aunty, featured a memorable adventure in which Jeremy Clarkson, driving a rally car, played cat and mouse with the Army’s shinest, scariest, hugest big boys’ toys. And jolly cartoon stuff it was too; Mad Max on steroids. But I bet there were a lot of people who shook their heads with sadness as they watched it.

The film was designed to show-case the Army’s mechanical machismo. The Jackal. The Mastiff. The Panther. The Trojan. Millions of pounds’ worth of futuristic military hardware possessing shields to deflect bombs, probes to clear mines, grabbers to grab stuff; and the horse power to whisk men to safety. Everything, in fact, designed to enable the Army to wipe out the enemy, any enemy, in a few hours. Just like it happens in the movies. And in Army recruitment films.

Except that, the Top Gear credits having rolled, one switched over to the Ten O’Clock News and the real world. That’s the world where young British soldiers are being pinned down in vehicles that cannot protect them and are being wiped out by roadside bombs. Take the Jackal, for instance, so mine-resistant that ten men have died in it in the last year in Helmand.

I don’t mean to criticise Top Gear: it represents some of the most fun to be had on TV. But their timing was rotten. When eight young men have died within 24 hours, blown up because of a lack of military hardware to protect them, there was a terrible irony to that episode. And when the real world runs up against a play world, we have to be very careful.

The average Top Gear viewer would see me as a soppy girly but if I’m honest I couldn’t bear to think of all those young men with shining eyes who watched the show and were seduced by the fantasy; and whose mothers, sometime in the future, may get that dreaded knock to say, yes, we’re sorry, but your son, your lovely, bright, funny teenager, who you adored all his life, is dead in the dust of Afghanistan.

Truth be told, can anyone face another single word about 18-year-old boys dying in that godforsaken place? I’ve stopped watching the news and reading those bits in the papers. It rips out my heart a little every time, the sight of those young men’s fresh, hopeful faces, and the knowledge that yet another mother, somewhere, has just had her heart ripped out for eternity. The world is just too bloody cruel.

Don’t be vague

Still on soldiers, but from a different age, I spent a magical afternoon recently with Earl “Dawyck” Haig, who died this week. The 2nd Earl Haig, son of Field-Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, the First World War commander, was 90, and very frail, but possessed of an extraordinary clarity and sweetness. He talked of his father — the bits of the national hero “that I was allowed to own”. Haig, an artist, dedicated his whole life to restoring his father’s reputation. “He was a lovely, and loving, father, and full of warmth. A gentle, contemplative man. It was a great shock when he went and we realised he didn’t just belong to one, and one’s family, but also to the nation. I still pass places where we went together and a feeling of love comes into one’s mind,” he told me.

He had a wicked terrier called Sparkle, which he described in Gerard Manley Hopkinsesque terms as “a rotter; wild as a hawk”, and my abiding memory is of climbing several steep flights of stairs behind the old man and the buzzy little dog, to be shown the shrine of mementos he had created to his father. Whatever else the field marshal’s legacy, he left love.

Pain in the neck

Five hundred years (and four days) after the birth of John Calvin — he who taught us that we were not put on this earth to enjoy ourselves — self-immolation is fashionable again. An academic, an associate professor in midwifery at Nottingham University, believes pain is a “rite of passage” that often helps regulate childbirth, strengthen a mother’s bond with her baby and prepares her for motherhood. Forgive me, I neglected to give the name. It’s Dr Denis Walsh. He’s a man, but not to my knowledge one who can bear children.

Dr Walsh wants to alert society to the hazards of the “epidural epidemic”, saying that women should be more prepared to endure pain and that the NHS is too quick to give in to requests for painkilling injections.

There’s simply no point trying to be reasonable about this. Dr Walsh either wants women to suffer or he thinks being controversial is a good career move. Either way, this is the midwifery equivalent of bombing women back to the Stone Age. Personally speaking, I’d rather take my chances with the Taleban than inhabit a system run by Dr Walsh and his kind.

And incidentally, don’t you think men should be banned from becoming midwives? If we’re talking tradition, after all, a male midwife is even more unnatural than a pain-free childbirth.

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