This story of two neighbours and their Christmas gifts is the most gloriously British tale ever

To be British is to embark upon a life-long quest to avoid social awkwardness at all costs.

Nothing, repeat nothing is more important than this.

To achieve this aim, the British person is prepared to accept apologising for things that definitely aren’t their fault, not point out errors that someone else has made, and even go as far as to praise something that is obviously bad - never, ever complaining and bravely ploughing on with something that is clearly ludicrous if the alternative is to ‘make a scene’.

And Twitter has provided a truly glorious example of the latter, with writer Ariane Sherine sharing a story involving her husband and his neighbour taking part in an annual festive exchanging of gifts.

She wrote: “For 12 years, my husband gave his neighbour a six-pack of beer at Christmas, and received a box of chocolates. They thanked each other warmly.

“My husband couldn’t eat the chocolates as he’s vegan, and later found out that his neighbour was teetotal.”

An absolute classic, we think you’ll agree.

And others were quick to tell their tales of similar too-much-politeness-to-function.

The story also prompted one responder to link to a classic tale of Britishness, as told by Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy author Douglas Adams in the posthumous 2002 collection The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time:

’Cookies’

“This actually did happen to a real person, and the real person is me. I had gone to catch a train. This was April 1976, in Cambridge, U.K. I was a bit early for the train. I’d gotten the time of the train wrong. I went to get myself a newspaper to do the crossword, and a cup of coffee and a packet of cookies. I went and sat at a table. I want you to picture the scene. It’s very important that you get this very clear in your mind. Here’s the table, newspaper, cup of coffee, packet of cookies. There’s a guy sitting opposite me, perfectly ordinary-looking guy wearing a business suit, carrying a briefcase. It didn’t look like he was going to do anything weird. What he did was this: he suddenly leaned across, picked up the packet of cookies, tore it open, took one out, and ate it.

“Now this, I have to say, is the sort of thing the British are very bad at dealing with. There’s nothing in our background, upbringing, or education that teaches you how to deal with someone who in broad daylight has just stolen your cookies. You know what would happen if this had been South Central Los Angeles. There would have very quickly been gunfire, helicopters coming in, CNN, you know… But in the end, I did what any red-blooded Englishman would do: I ignored it. And I stared at the newspaper, took a sip of coffee, tried to do aclue in the newspaper, couldn’t do anything, and thought, What am I going to do?

“In the end I thought Nothing for it, I’ll just have to go for it, and I tried very hard not to notice the fact that the packet was already mysteriously opened. I took out a cookie for myself. I thought, That settled him. But it hadn’t because a moment or two later he did it again. He took another cookie. Having not mentioned it the first time, it was somehow even harder to raise the subject the second time around. “Excuse me, I couldn’t help but notice…” I mean, it doesn’t really work.

“We went through the whole packet like this. When I say the whole packet, I mean there were only about eight cookies, but it felt like a lifetime. He took one, I took one, he took one, I took one. Finally, when we got to the end, he stood up and walked away. Well, we exchanged meaningful looks, then he walked away, and I breathed a sigh of relief and st back.

“A moment or two later the train was coming in, so I tossed back the rest of my coffee, stood up, picked up the newspaper, and underneath the newspaper were my cookies. The thing I like particularly about this story is the sensation that somewhere in England there has been wandering around for the last quarter-century a perfectly ordinary guy who’s had the same exact story, only he doesn’t have the punch line.”

Absolutely glorious.