For those with an interest in such things, there is all manner of facial hair and beard-based goings-on in Kandahar Province.

Amusement can be derived from any quarter, fulfilling stereotypes, provoking sniggers or envious looks. The variety on offer is infinite.

The locals come forth sporting variously, the sage beard (wise man not herb), the clerical beard, the young man’s growth, and a personal favourite of mine, the henna-dyed-beard. As your facial topiary gaze alights onto the stalwart members of the International Security Assistance Force, for your delectation we have the Dutch handlebar, the close cropped Arabian, the RAF whisker, the French bristle, and the Royal Navy’s whateveryouchoose.

I have never really understood why the Sea-loving part of the military is unchecked for facial growth. I assume it may be a submariner related custom. Or of course it may out of consideration for general marine life.

If I was a Mackerel going about my daily grind of swimming and eating smaller fish and plankton, nothing would put me off my Krill quicker than a mouthful of discarded shaving water populated with coarse ginger bristles. Not to mention a crab having his afternoon constitutional stroll irrevocably marred by stamping one or more of his (or her) numerous legs on a rusty razor.

We have been ‘on the ground’ a good deal this week, and one of the more heart-breaking realities has been the contact we have had with hundreds of children who are born into abject poverty, it is almost impossible to dehumanise these unwitting souls, victims of generations of pernicious activity and largely fettered to slum living or malnourished peripatetic livestock.

The Governor of the City, Governor Wesa, is an educated man, holding degrees from both western and eastern universities, he is extolling the virtues of education and agriculture as the mechanisms of change that he, and others, hope will return a degree of prosperity to the region.

As such, the pen is a symbol of hope, for they understand it to be a portent of education, and that is their passage unto a new world. We managed to handout pens and paper and water and toys to as many children as we could, but invariably there is never enough.

It makes the arduous and dangerous nature of our job, that much better when one can bring a smile and a shard of dream to these ill fated youngsters.

Illustrative of how vast the chasm of cultures between Britain and Kandahar is are occurrences at school. In England a head teacher was recently vilified for allowing school children to raise a lamb. This taught animal husbandry, the aim was ultimately to have the lamb butchered and eaten, an educative process on the every day habit of putting food on the table.

The complaints came in and ‘intellectual Eunuchs’ portrayed this woman as a deranged tyrant unfit for post, some removed their children from the school, and sadly the teacher felt she had to resign, essentially for teaching.

Elsewhere children have been banned from playing conkers in the playground because of health and safety risks?!

In the last month in Kandahar, there have been attempts at destroying schools through insurgent gunmen and in one instance three suicide bombers entered the central girls' school. Did the parents have the option of complaining and moving the children away? No.

They are all aware of the importance of education as the most likely route to a better life, and that also includes educating and elucidating on the realities of life, a perspective the chicken-nugget-eating, over-protective, veracity-avoiding lobbyists seem to have entirely lost. Choice and ignorance-perpetuating are dangerous bedfellows.

Those reading this who belong to the tranche of society that are outspoken in their contempt of the much-maligned ‘Playstation Generation’, rest assured that I witness hundreds of them, daily, conducting acts of supreme generosity, selflessness, gallantry and moral integrity. Some or most of which would make the prosaic actions of their detractors look rather egocentric, cowardly and callous.

People often use the word ‘surreal’, when ‘faintly odd’ would be more accurate. For example; there was a man dressed as a dog holding a sign advertising a pet sale. This is odd not surreal; the Dali exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery was surreal.

So to continue my flagrant misuse of this language; there was a surreal moment this week when a few of us were climbing up a mountain ridge that borders Kandahar’s western edge. As we approached the several thousand feet mark, we stumbled across an Afghan security force Observation Post, not in itself an oddity. What was surreal was that the two guards who were not on duty were in a rocky alcove hidden in the ridgeline watching Indiana Jones, in English, through an improvised satellite dish. Surreal.

They are a resourceful bunch the Afghans. I cannot get mobile telephone signal in south Dorset, or TMS on my world service radio, but they can watch Hollywood royalty 1000m up the side of a mountain in the middle of one of the poorest countries on earth.

The guards were welcoming and helpful with our task in hand, and brewed some tea for us, to help stiffen the old sinews for the descent.