I’VE just washed my hands with a bar of good old-fashioned soap. You know, the stuff that lurks on a supermarket shelf fighting for space against a multitude of soap pumps and the latest superhero of the keep-it-clean brigade, the “no-touch hand wash system”.

You’ll have seen the advert on the telly. It’s one that makes me want to throw things at the screen. The one where smiley, very, very clean children tumble into a super-sterile zone – supposedly a kitchen – and waft hands beneath this battery-driven contraption that “automatically senses hands and dispenses just the right amount of soap so you and your family will never have to touch a germy soap pump again”.

Talk about sending mothers on a guilt trip. Because, naturally, any mother who doesn’t want the best for her children is a poor one. And presumably that includes keeping them away from germs.

So any mother who doesn’t go out of her way to protect her offspring from horrible, nasty, illness-inducing microbes should no doubt be reported to social services – assuming that is, there are any left after slash-and-burn local government cuts.

You’ve only got to spend a short time in front of telly adverts to see that mums – plus those who fall off ladders or trip over pavement slabs – are the key targets of cynical marketeers. For not only are they being urged not to let their kids touch manky soap dispensers (presumably taps are a complete no-fly zone), but when they’re talking to the washing machine repair man they have to make sure their kids are wearing their crash helmets when they ride their scooter through the kitchen.

Which presumably means that if ten year olds venture out on to the pavement, or heaven forbid, the street in front of their house, they have to don complete body armour. Over their chemical biological radiation and nuclear suits.

We really do take this health and safety nonsense to the extreme. We encourage our kids to live in a sterile bubble where a bit of muck is the stuff of the devil. No wonder they’re dropping like flies as soon as they come within yards of a school toilet.

For it’s all a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Protect youngsters too much from all known germs and they don’t build up robust immune systems to fight off the repercussions of the kid in the next desk wiping his snotty nose on his sleeve.

Put them in crash helmets, elbow pads, kneepads and blister-protecting gloves to protect them from the huge dangers of riding their scooter down the garden path, and no wonder they scream the street down at the merest hint of a scratch or graze.

If I was the health secretary, instead of introducing a philosophy of pile ’em high, sell ’em cheap operations and making GPs become admin managers rather than doctors, I would introduce a germ and graze charter.

I’d make every toddler toddle to a pile of dirt and make them sit there and eat worms. I’d show them how to make mud pies and then stick dirty fingers in their mouths.

And I’d let them pick up and eat the piece of bread they’ve dropped on the ground rather than whipping it out of their chubby hand with a frenzied cry of: “Don’t eat that! It’s broken the five-second rule!” Which basically means that if you drop a morsel of food on the floor and don’t pick it up within five seconds you’re going to die of botulism or something if you subsequently eat it.

Then when they’ve done being dirty I’d show them how to use a bar of soap so they can learn how to become clean again before the next day’s bit of mud flinging.

When said toddlers are five or six I’d show them what it was like to fall off their bike (with not a stabiliser in sight) and tell them what a scab on their knee is and how to pick it off without making it bleed.

And at about seven or eight, I’d make sure all kids were given lessons in tree climbing and how to fall out of them and bounce.

Just to even things up a bit, a few of them would break a wrist, and visit their local hospital to learn that a bit of pain can be borne without abject fear of it ever befalling them in the first place, and is part and parcel of growing up.

Being outdoors would become the antidote to Facebook, PlayStations and the X-Box.

In fact, it would become so de rigueur that hiding out in your teenage bedroom – or using a no-touch hand wash contraption for that matter – would become as socially unacceptable as drink-driving.