"Afghanistan is still running very strongly and I suspect it is going to do so for a good while yet," says Ed in today's review.

British troops in Afghanistan are holding a private memorial service to remember the eight men who died last week in a single 24-hour period.

The programme played an extract from the speech that will be read at the service, followed by a discussion with counterinsurgency experts David Kilcullen and Michael Clarke on the strategic importance of the cause for which the soldiers died.

Earlier in the programme Wais Barmak, a deputy minister at the Afghan Ministry for Rural Rehabilitation and Development, was asked whether the country could be reconstructed successfully given the levels of corruption inherent in the Afghan system.

While he suggested that conditions were improving and corruption was being dealt with, he also admitted that the creation of a stable Afghanistan would take "decades" to complete.

There were also, says Ed, a lot of "interesting stories about the way we live" on the programme.

Dr Denis Walsh, associate professor in midwifery at the University of Nottingham, debated with Dr Maggie Blott whether the increasing number of women choosing to avoid pain during childbirth was a problematic trend.

And Dr Richard Stephens explained the results of research into swearing which appear to show that the increased heart rate, and therefore heightened emotion, associated with swearing may lead to a higher tolerance to pain.

Finally, one of the authors of a book which looks at the financial strategies employed by some of the two billion people who live on less than $2 a day, discussed his research.

Jonathan Morduch said that while many people in wealthier countries might imagine a hand to mouth existence on $2 a day, many of the people the authors spoke to actually used surprisingly imaginative financial strategies.