THIS week, some advice for any upper-class or would-be upper-class people who find themselves in Swindon.

If a copy of this article has reached you, perhaps via a care parcel sent to a Swindonian butler or gardener by one of their relatives here, I implore you to distribute copies among your friends.

Most of you will never undergo what, for you, would be the terrifying experience of crossing our town boundary. With luck, you will have heeded the recent advice of Tatler magazine that we are a no-go zone for folk such as yourself.

But what if you find yourself here against your will? What if your car breaks down on the M4 and is unable to limp to the relative safety of Berkshire in one direction or Gloucestershire in the other?

What if a working class person unwraps a Scotch egg or a sausage roll in your vicinity during a train journey, and you have no option but to pull the communication cord and flee while passing through Swindon?

The first thing to remember is not to panic. You are not Donald Pleasance in Escape From New York. Nobody is going to cut off one of your fingers and send it to your people with a demand for access to the outside world.

Probably not, anyway.

Your best bet is simply to call a servant for a lift and try not to draw too much attention to yourself while waiting for them to arrive.

If you are here early in the morning, you may notice thousands of people heading purposefully in various directions on foot, on bicycles and in vehicles. Should you arrive late in the afternoon, you may see them heading in various directions while appearing somewhat tired.

Those people have been doing something called work, which is quite popular in Swindon and helps to prevent the entire country from grinding to a standstill. Work generally involves receiving money in exchange for being a useful human being.

Other ways of being a useful human being are also popular here, such as generally being a pleasant person and not rushing to judgement of those we perceive as being in some way different from ourselves.

You may encounter people whose clothing, vehicles and other possessions suggest they are in the same financial bracket as yourself or are even wealthier.

In order to avoid mutual confusion, it is best not to talk to such people.

They may well have a great deal of money, but the chances are that it isn’t real money. That is to say, it will be money they’ve made themselves rather than inheriting it or getting it from a trust fund.

Remember that thing called work, which we were just talking about? Well, if a person is good enough at work, and willing to work very hard, they can sometimes get a lot of money.

If you go back far enough in your own lineage, perhaps to the decades before your genetic soup thickened to the point of solidification, there may have been an ordinary person who was good enough at work to found your family fortune.

On the subject of genetics, you may note some unusual physical characteristics among the people you see here – characteristics unlike those displayed by many of your family and friends.

You may notice, for example, that the overwhelming majority of Swindonians have a bony protuberance between their upper neck and their lower teeth. This is known as a "chin" and is nothing to be alarmed about.

Try not to stare, though.