When I was a very small boy my father took me upon his knee and made shiny coins appear from my ears as though by magic. Then he lit his pipe and said to me: "My boy, what do you want to be when you grow up?"

And I thought about it as I sat there inhaling the curling blue fumes of Rum and Maple, and I looked up at him and I said, with a faraway light in my eyes: "Daddy, I want to be a human shield."

No, of course I didn't. Even at the age of five I wasn't a complete idiot. I may not have known much about the world, but I knew enough from reading my War Illustrated comics and my tattered old copies of Sergeant Rock that war is a nasty, noisy, violent affair, in which people are killed and the old are left mourning the young.

I probably also would have been able to guess that if I ever really passionately believed in something, sitting underneath a falling bomb would be just about the worst possible way to accomplish that something. Unless of course what I really passionately believed in was that I should die beneath a pile of concrete and rubble.

Chump that he is, we can only be grateful that he failed

But that's just me. Our human shields were back from Baghdad and appearing on Carte Blanche last week. We met Mohammed again. We had first met Mohammed on the evening news, waving goodbye to his weeping family and bravely promising them, like Douglas MacArthur, that he would return.

"I'll be back," said Mohammed. Mohammed was as good as his word. He was back all right. He and his buddies were back just as soon as they get on a flight to come back. Apparently, explained Mohammed, when bombs start falling on a city it becomes very nasty and noisy and violent. People, he went on to explain, die.

All of which leads the casual viewer to suspect one of two things. Either Mohammed had been expecting America to call off its bombers the moment intelligence reports revealed that his flight from Johannesburg had landed, or he simply hadn't taken five minutes to imagine what it would be like to be in a city being bombed.

Followed by five minutes of asking himself whether his convictions were sufficiently strong to keep him there.

Men and women of principle are always to be admired, but you can't help feeling that what took the so-called human shields to Baghdad while other men and women of antiwar principle stayed home was not as much stronger principle as it was greater self-absorption. "I have no regrets for what I've done," declared Mohammed proudly. To which it was hard not to reply: "Well, of course you don't. That's because you haven't done anything."

When it comes to flirting, first fool yourself

The Carte Blanche team interviewed Mohammed's wife Hassina and his son Zain, a close and loving family still trembling as they remembered the time when he was gone. As I looked at them and heard their voices cracking and faltering, my mild irritation with Mohammed turned unexpectedly to anger.

War kills enough civilians as it is. Even without war, women lose their husbands and children lose their fathers, even when those husbands and fathers are not flying headlong into a perilous situation they have not properly considered. For several days Mohammed tried his best to join the dead fathers of Iraq.

Chump that he is, we can only be grateful that he failed.

But while Mohammad was flirting with terminal stupidity, other folks were simply learning how to flirt. The second insert on Carte Blanche (M-Net; Sunday; 7pm) introduced us to the men and women of Madame Heskell's Academy of Flirting. Madame Heskell is a London-based entrepreneur with an eye for the main chance. In this modern world of ours, in which people pay money to be told by other people that they do not need other people to tell them that they are okay, the main chance is in the field of self-esteem.

Specifically, Madame Heskell teaches people how to chat up other people.

"You have to fix what's inside you before you pay attention to what's going on outside," Madame Heskell announced grandly. Somehow you just knew she was going to say that.

Madame Heskell was a peculiar-looking woman of a certain age, who spoke out of the corner of her mouth as though she were slipping microfilm into your pocket and instructing you to meet her at the Casbah. She had an extraordinary blonde hairdo, as though she had hired Cruella de Ville to make her a hairpiece from the pelts of 1 001 poodles. It differed from her hairy outsized woollen jersey only in that it wasn't a jersey.

Looking at La Heskell, you could only hope that she soon fixes what's inside, so she can get around to paying some attention to the outside.

Despite being an expert flirter, Madame Heskell is not constantly plagued by male attention.

"Although I am very attractive, I deliberately do not send out 'available' vibes," she declared grandly, thereby inadvertently delivering an important lesson: when it comes to flirting, first fool yourself.

No kidding, this is golden advice, and I am not even being paid extra for telling it to you. On the whole, if we don't think we're attractive, people tend to agree with us. Since we have to face facts and recognise that by objective standards most of us cannot by any stretch of the imagination be considered attractive, it follows that self-delusion is our only hope.

If we can successfully convince ourselves of something, there is always some sucker out there who will buy it too. This is the fundamental truth upon which society is built.

"I see myself as the gateway to who you really are," announced Madame Heskell, and I almost had the impression that she believed it.