This festive season, my family excelled themselves at 'taking people down a peg or two' – I'm thinking of offering it as a service to A-listers

Looking back at 2017, it’s pretty obvious that there’s a long list of people (ahem – mostly men) who need taking down a peg or two.

Being “taken down a peg or two” is not practiced nearly enough, in my opinion. It was big in the Sixties and Seventies when teachers were allowed to belittle kids and tell them they wouldn’t amount to anything (hey thanks for that Miss Monroe, you monstrous bulgy-eyed witch – you’re to blame for the fact that mental arithmetic still makes me soil myself).

Now, I’m not suggesting we turn the clock back to the bad old days of ritualistically humiliating small children, but I do think that any grown adult who has become a bit “too big for their boots”, or, in modern speak, “has an overinflated sense of entitlement” and is therefore displaying signs of obnoxious behaviour, should immediately be sentenced to spending next Christmas with my family.

My family are brilliant at taking people down a peg or two; they are gold medal ego-busters, and I know this for a fact because, judging by a recent three-day festive break we spent together in the chilly bosom of a Welsh farmhouse, they basically think everyone is rubbish and/or a bit crap or boring and ugly.

Nobel prize winners are “overrated”, sporting heroes are “twats”, Michelin-starred chefs have got “irritating eyebrows”, supermodels are “very average-looking”, national treasures are “fat, old hasbeens” and, according to my mother, most female newsreaders should be lined up and shot against the wall for “crimes against blouses”.

It was like being trapped in a never-ending hypercritical episode of Gogglebox Takes On the Entire World, featuring a family who are genetically engineered to slag off everybody and everything, including big fluffy bobble hats, kimchi and Nigella Lawson – actually make that especially Nigella Lawson, poor cow.

“But why is she like that? No one else is like that – she’s not normal!” came the cry from an unwashed sack of crumb-infested pyjamas on the sofa (OK, it was me).

This ability to prick the bubble of pomposity seems to be a particularly northern skill; in fact, I’ve come to the conclusion that having a northern mother is the opposite of being raised by a traditional Jewish Mom. My mother’s reaction to the last novel I wrote was, “Yes, I quite enjoyed it, but not as much as the other one.”

Me, plaintively: “Which other one?”

Mother: “Oh, I can’t remember its name.”

Now don’t get me wrong: I am grateful for this.

Without my mother’s voice in my head constantly reminding me that I’m “just showing off and it’s getting a bit boring”, I would be a great waddling toad of ego, all puffed up with my own self-importance – but thanks to my roots, I’m a snivelling bag of insecurity who relies on the applause of paying strangers for comfort, so that’s good.

And no, dear reader, I won’t be looking at the online comments in response to this article – I’m far too sensitive, so troll away, you weirdos.

In light of my Christmas experience as well as totting up the number of people who have displayed a monstrous lack of self-awareness over the last few months, I’m thinking of setting up a short, sharp, shock service.

The next time some Hollywood A-lister gets a bit upitty, he should be sent to live with my mum on the drizzly Fylde coast, where she will make him empty the “bitty bucket”, queue for wet fish down a back alley and be told repeatedly that “no one is very interested in you”. He will also have to sleep in a child’s bed with one pillow and a mattress that could very easily double up as a breadboard.

Alternatively they could end up spending a couple of weeks of hard labour with my notoriously frugal older sister, who lives in south-east London and boils down chicken bones to make wallpaper paste. Here they will be woken at 7am to lay concrete slabs in the back garden, frog-marched to Southwark council’s refuse and recycling centre for “fun” and, if found attempting to turn the central heating on, have their hands cut off – without anaesthetic, unless of course anaesthetic is on special offer at Morrison’s.

Serial offenders and people who have done something really bad might be condemned to a stretch in Tunbridge Wells, where my brother would proceed to be “snide” to their faces 24 hours a day, eventually wearing down any veneer of self-confidence until they are reduced to quivering bags of neurotic self-loathing. He can do it to me in about 45 minutes, so I reckon Donald Trump would last three days.