At times like these, what women secretly want is a ‘real man’

‘And you, what would you do for love?” Here we go: Mothering Sunday is hurtling towards us faster than you can say “what do you mean Thorntons closed all its shops last year?” And, as is the norm, we’ll now be bombarded with a predictable slew of advertisements for flowers and fragrance until Sunday March 27.

Natalie Portman will be popping up on our screens breathlessly challenging us to demonstrate what lengths we’re prepared to go to in order to show we care. In previous years, she might have meant the bigger, 150ml Miss Dior spray at £149 a pop. (Oh, go on then…)

But we are in a changed world now, one in which, across Ukraine, we are witnessing exactly how far people will go for love. Love of country. Love of family. Love of strangers in dire need.

It is inspiring and humbling to see frail hospital patients being carried to relative safety, mothers shepherding weepy children into crammed buses, soldiers guarding the wounded, the frightened and the dispossessed beneath bombed bridges and razed apartment blocks.

Insane acts of courage have become almost routine. It’s what people in extremis do. Ploughshares have been fashioned into swords, tyres into roadblocks, and every empty bottle is a valuable molotov cocktail-in-waiting.

The bravery, the fierce solidarity, the grief-stricken mass burials are a salutary reminder that the West’s preoccupation with mechanisation, artificial intelligence and an idealised society largely run by technology ill-prepares us for any crisis greater than a lost Wi-fi signal.

“Soft skills” are worth an estimated £88billion to the UK every year – and forecasters at Deloitte have predicted skill-intensive occupations will account for two-thirds of jobs by 2030.

Empathy, emotional intelligence, collaboration and communication are among the key attributes that will be crucial to the smarter, faster, better offices of tomorrow. These will be our virtual battlegrounds as we fight for the right to choose our own pronouns and work from home half the week. A culture of mindfulness and is all fine and dandy in peacetime, with a choice of oat or soya milk. In war, you need someone who can dig a trench, chop wood and make split-second strategic decisions without agonising over diversity.

In other words, good, old-fashioned hard skills. I can guarantee the men, and indeed women, of Ukraine are living in the moment as they shift rubble and shoot down enemy aircraft without recourse to workshops on breathing and synergy.

The collaboration and communication abilities of those leading an army of volunteers are not in any doubt. But I hope we can agree that it is all to the good they are unencumbered by management-speak and 360-degree appraisals of their cognitive flexibility. The only reasonable response is awe.

We only fight for the right to choose our own pronouns and work at home half the week

An acquaintance has been saying she’s not convinced that, if her high-earning, bonus-winning banker spouse were conscripted in a time of crisis, he would be manly enough to get through the initial selection, much less be given a live weapon.

When she claims her “next” husband will be the sort of chap who can build a shelter and kill a bear, she is, of course, being deliberately fatuous (I hope).

But her provocative musings highlight how little value the middle classes place on what used to be regarded as “masculine” traits. Somewhere along the line, the mastery of Excel spreadsheets became more respected than the ability to make things, to use tools, to physically shape our environment.

Back in 1982, American humorist Bruce Feirstein published Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche by way of satirising stereotypes of masculinity. We know now that real men, whether they earn their daily bread primarily on the brain or the brawn end of the spectrum, eat anything. Even crushed avocados.

In much of the world now, male success is epitomised by a well-cut suit and a desk. And yet the traditional male archetype exerts an undeniable pull; in the US, every made-for-tv romantic movie invariably features a workaholic interior designer or wedding planner who is suddenly dispatched to Hicksville County where she falls for the strapping fella wrangling longhorns, mending the barn and surveying her fancy city ways with amused derision. It’s a formula – but a winning one.

Obviously, he turns out to be the wealthy ranch owner, not the ranch hand, because the female audience may be hopelessly romantic, but they’re a canny bunch who have no intention of letting their heroine sleep in the bunkhouse. Wearing a checked shirt and making the epiphanic discovery that, despite that degree from Yale, true fulfilment actually resides in drinking homemade lemonade on a West Virginian porch swing, is compromise enough.

Here in the real world, as Russian thermobaric rockets fall, there’s no pause for navel-gazing. The exigencies of survival are all that matter. Food. Water. Medicine. Shelter. Escape.

Those who choose to stay behind in Ukraine, those who left but felt compelled to return, are mounting an astonishing defence of the land and the life they hold dear.

Would we do the same if Britain were invaded? If we searched for the hero inside ourselves, would we find one – or just a punchline from the sitcom Miranda?

Truthfully, all we can do is donate more money to Ukraine, hold our loved ones tight and hope to God we never have to find out exactly what we would do for love.