I actually said this quite a while ago, but it has come back to haunt me. There are a few feeds I follow on Twitter and Facebook that poke fun at the whole British urban middle class liberal experience: among them, ‘Overheard in Waitrose’. They post – unsurprisingly – ridiculous things that have been heard in Waitrose: “No Tarquin, we prefer black olives on our artisan foccachia” sort of stuff. Real first world problems.

Well, Sebastian and Annabelle love brioche. Not the artisan kind. The kind that has chocolate chips and comes in bags of eight preschooler-hand-sized rolls. It is an easy, mess-free breakfast that generally ends up in their tummies rather than on the floor or in the bin. So we buy a lot of brioche. 

We also – a family of six goes through a lot of food – go to the supermarket quite frequently. And this is where it happened.

It was an evening after work so everyone was tired. We (stupidly) put Sebastian and Annabelle in the double-seat trolley and they were – as usual – treating each other as punchbags, with Sebastian being the ringleader. Finally, in the bread aisle, I had had enough. I snapped. I threatened Sebastian that if he didn’t stop hitting there would be no brioche. And – for once – it worked.

Later that night I posted my comment – “Sebastian, stop hitting your sister or you won’t get any brioche!” – to the Overheard in Waitrose page, and added something along the lines of, ‘I’m so ashamed, I sound like an awful middle class cliché like the ones you make fun of’. I was poking fun at myself, honestly. So imagine my horror when I saw this: 

They used my quotation. And not in a way that acknowledged my intention to self-mock. In a way that turned me into one of the people they were showing up as ludicrous. THE SHAME. And then, to compound my misery, other FB feeds – like The Poke – started to share the post, and it was all over my FB feed. 

The moral of the story? It could be not to bother mocking yourself on social media lest your comments end up being used in a way you had not intended. Or it could be to avoid threatening your children in supermarkets. Or it could be to not eat brioche unless you plan on making your own.