If you’re in the market for a new book, can I recommend a comedy published this week? It’s called England and it’s by a German lawyer called Detlev Piltz. I know, I know, if you’re looking for a laugh on your Easter holidays, a book by a German lawyer might not be the first thing that leaps to mind. But I’m telling you it’s very funny and I barked with mirth throughout.

I’m being a bit mean. The book isn’t technically a comedy; it’s a non-fiction book about class. Mr Piltz first visited Britain in 1961 when he was 16 and the trip seems to have left such an impression that he’s been studying our peculiar ways ever since. Just over 60 years on, he’s distilled his learnings into a 424-page book of near-obsessive detail. Did you know, for example, that it’s upper class to have a cracked wooden loo seat and working class to have a plastic one?

What you must do is buy this book and read it while imagining the voiceover of a German David Attenborough. “Today’s mating places are universities, the workplace, leisure and events venues,” Mr Piltz intones in the faintly Mengele-sounding section headed “cross-class marriages”.

The comedy continues. The physical characteristics of the upper class include “thin hands”, a “narrow stoat’s head”, “hanging eyelids” and a “relatively small mouth” which bring to mind a creature I saw once in The Mummy. The working class look like Mr Potato Head: short necks, short arms and fingers, strong hands, stout legs.

In the “Vocabulary and Language” chapter, we’re told that someone upper class would say “John is attracted to the au pair girl” while someone working class would say “John fancies the au pair” (proper howl at that). In the chapter about cars (well, he is German), Mr Piltz says that you can tell an upper class car because it will be filled with “apple cores, biscuit crumbs, bits of paper, horse and dog-related dirt” which made me suspect that my mother picked him up from the airport.

The upper classes only eat mustard from earthenware pots while the working classes like it from a squeezy bottle, although apparently there is something that everyone does: “virtually all the English watch television at least once a day.”

It’s heaven, unintentionally. Although the book’s subtitle is “An Outsider’s View” so Mr Piltz admits that he’s coming at it from a foreigner’s perspective, and to be fair plenty of the detail is bang on. Posh dogs include labradors and various terriers; not posh dogs include alsatians and boxers (no letters please, I haven’t made these rules). Less accurate observations include the assertion that East Sussex is a smarter county than West Sussex, and that the upper classes won’t have a second drink before dinner. Perhaps he meant breakfast?

Here’s a little secret, though. Worrying about the flowers in your garden (lupins are posh, he says, but pink roses are not), or whether you eat your peas on the concave or convex side of your fork are silly distractions. The secret is not to give a stuff about any of this. Proper toffs are imbued with a confidence that verges on eccentricity, and in fact does still tip over into eccentricity in many cases, and they simply don’t care whether the milk goes in first, or what your doorbell sounds like, or what John’s intentions are regarding the au pair.

It’s actually very middle-class to worry about these things – and deeply liberating when you realise that they don’t matter.

Even my favourite royal has estate-agent problems

New favourite royal alert! She’s Princess Rita Jenrette Boncompagni Ludovisi, a 72-year-old American whose first husband was a Democratic congressman, has appeared in Playboy twice and later married an Italian toff who owned a socking great big villa in Rome worth around £400m, billed as the world’s most expensive private home and which boasts the only surviving Caravaggio ceiling fresco. 

The trouble is the Italian toff has died and Princess Rita is trying to sell the villa, but having dropped the price twice, it’s still available and she’s blaming the agents for being useless, lamenting: “They’re more accustomed to selling off confiscated scooters and boats!” Nice to know the rich have as many problems with estate agents as the rest of us.

The new ‘set jetters’ might just help save these money pits…

Are you a set jetter? I love this new descriptor for those, mostly 20-somethings, who have started spending their weekends gleefully touring big houses, including Stowe and Petworth, which have starred in Bridgerton (set visits, geddit?). People scoff about the silliness of the TV show (I do, frequently), but if it’s encouraging younger punters into stately picture galleries I’m all for it. 

My grandmother was a big one for National Trust properties, and much of my childhood was spent in the back of her Peugeot before being dragged around the panelled rooms, trying to look interested in ancient chamber pots and portraits of people in wigs (for a child, the chamber pots were always the highlight). If the youth are now visiting with genuine enthusiasm, how lovely – for them and the coffers of these money pits.