Make stupid mistakes; it's the only way we ever really learn

And I've done some pretty stupid things in my life.

More than once too: there've been many lessons that I should have learned, but didn't.

Then there was the purchase of any Oasis album after Be Here Now.

The recurring hope every August that THIS will be my football team's year.

Thankfully, other lessons have been so stark, staringly obvious, even I couldn't miss them.

There was the one and only time I dyed my hair and ended up looking like Rod Stewart's toilet brush crop gone very badly wrong.

Give me my 50 shades of grey over that, thank you very much.

There was the day I stepped in to help out my local cricket team when they were short, only to find myself facing 100mph bouncers (well, they seemed that fast) from an old football enemy.

Fourth ball in, I nudged one to First Slip. "Not out!" said the umpire.

"It bl**dy was," I replied as I headed for the safety of the pavilion.

I've kissed girls I shouldn't have, climbed semi-naked onto a fourth-floor window ledge for an ill-advised stag do photo-shoot and sang I Will Survive at karaoke in public.

None of it tops my most reckless and idiotic moment however, when I genuinely thought walking through a field littered with home-made mines in the middle of a war zone would be a good idea.

Frustrated while covering the Iraq War in 2003, a colleague and I picked our way across 150 yards of rough desert to reach an isolated shack which was home to a family of ordinary Iraqis.

The US Army major we were on patrol with told us he wouldn't give us any escort and that he was leaving in 30 minutes, with or without us.

But we were young-ish, keen and very, very stupid.

We hadn't gone far when we spotted the first device, sticking out of the ground and marked with what looked like tissue paper.

I'd like to say it was the heat, the stress, our journalistic hunger, or desire to tell these people's story that made us press on to the farmhouse in the shimmering middle distance.

But looking back, it was our stupidity.

We reached the house safely, talked to the people, handed out sweets to the children and then picked our way back across the desert to the waiting Americans just before they pulled out.

"You crazy sons of b**ches," said the sergeant, staring at us through his shades. "Y'know y'all could have ended up in red boiler suits on Al Jazeera by tonight?"

When the copy was printed in the Star, the editor at the time got letters from readers demanding we be withdrawn from the conflict and pointing out how stupid we had been.

But show me anyone who's never made a mistake, or done something stupid and I'll show you someone who's never lived.

Especially those in the public eye.

Which is why I have sympathy for Sky News reporter Colin Brazier, who was sent to the scene of the Malaysian air disaster in the Ukraine.

Amid the carnage of the wreckage – and live on TV – he bent down and began picking through a child's suitcase.

It was stupid, it was crass and it was a mistake he recognised within seconds.

He apologised immediately on air and acknowledged that he 'shouldn't be doing this'.

Most viewers (and it's doubtful how many there would have been on a Saturday lunchtime bulletin) would have thought it was distasteful, but accepted his on-air apology and drew a line under the incident.

But if we live in stupid times, we also live in nasty times and within minutes the reptiles were stirring in the cesspit of 'social' media.

You would think that fellow broadcasters would have some sympathy for Brazier and an understanding of the context behind his mistake; a chaotic crash scene, the horror of death all around and a distraught journalist trying to sanitise it for a TV audience thousands of miles away, in the safety of their living rooms.

But, no. One of the first to cast a stone was the BBC's achingly right-on radio presenter Shelagh Fogarty who tweeted: "Sky!!! Get your reporter to STOP rummaging thru belongings at #mH17 crash site. "We shouldn't really be doing this" NO S**T Sherlock !! Those items are essentially sacred things now for the relatives. Just appalling."

She's right, it was appalling. But as the reporter in question had already apologised, was there any need for her to draw attention to it?

What was she trying to achieve?

Predictably, others jumped into the fray to occupy what they probably saw as the moral high ground, without realising that by doing so, they made that territory exactly the opposite.

He had a moment of stupidity and made a mistake. He apologised.

And yet, others seized on it to make themselves look better and him look worse. So spare us your 'moral outrage'.

Presumably, most of those jumping on the bandwagon have never reported from a field full of dead bodies and mangled plane wreckage.

And, obviously, they've never made any stupid mistakes either.