Have you ever suffered from a posh injury that wasn’t your fault?

Icannot tell you which member of my family this story applies to because he’d be embarrassed, but my uncle went to the dentist the other day having cracked a tooth. The dentist asked how he’d managed that; my uncle replied that he’d eaten crab the previous evening and bitten down on a piece of shell. This was a fib. He’d eaten lobster, not crab, but, in these times of class antagonism, he couldn’t bring himself to say so. “Why didn’t he just say a toffee?” asked my sister, who argued that crab wasn’t much less posh than lobster. Well, we all panic when faced with the authorities, don’t we?

Mum came to stay with me in Norfolk last week and we laughed about this tale one evening while eating grouse. She’d bought a brace from the farm shop. The following morning, there was a shriek from the sink as she washed the pan and discovered a thin red worm flexing in the juice. It must have come from the grouse, declared Mum, and I googled the matter to discover that grouse can indeed be riddled with worms. We drove at speed to the nearest chemist where I made my mother ask for a pack of Ovex while I lurked in the corner inspecting face creams. “You mustn’t tell them we might have worms from eating grouse,” I’d hissed in the car. Oh, the shame of it.

Have you suffered a posh injury? A couple of years ago, a doctor warned that avocados should come with a health warning because he’d noticed a sharp rise in patients with sliced palms. This didn’t surprise me since a Tatler colleague had recently been rushed to hospital having slashed herself in exactly this manner, but she’d lied to the doctor and claimed to have done it while cutting “a fruit”. “Technically, an avocado is a fruit, so I wasn’t wrong,” she insisted afterwards. The hashtag #middleclassinjuries went viral on Twitter around the same time and others shared their own tales of woe. One reported a burnt mouth from baked camembert, another a