I AM afraid to say there has been a falling out in our family.

And to be quite frank, I doubt whether we will ever see eye to eye with our son and daughter on the subject again.

Lord knows we have tried to bring them up the proper way and – to be fair to them – most of the time they have done us proud.

That’s why it is such a shock to see them defy us in this way.

But we’ve just had to come to terms with it: when referring to the meal people eat between 5pm and 7pm, when they get home from school, work or wherever, they absolutely insist on calling it ‘dinner’.

As any right-thinking person will tell you, dinner is something you eat in the middle of the day, any time after midday, not in the evening, and if you can you will put aside 60 minutes for the purpose and call it your dinner hour.

But I am ashamed to say our kids are going round, openly calling this midday meal ‘lunch’.

When we were young, there was no such thing as lunch in our house.

Lunch was something other people had. Posher people. It was, after all, short for luncheon, which only the idle rich partook of.

The closest we ever got to having lunch was ‘a packed lunch’, but only because, for some reason, the term ‘packed dinner’ never caught on. And even that bore no relation to what people call packed lunches today. To us, a packed lunch was a couple of soggy cheese and tomato sandwiches, made from white bread and wrapped in an old Mother’s Pride bag. If you were lucky.

Although there was no lunch or luncheon, we did have luncheon meat, but it was only called that to make it sound more appetising when, in reality, it was meat that had been processed to within an inch of its life.

You can’t get it anymore, probably because if somebody tried to market it now, Panorama would be on the case and explain how it was made from all kinds of random pieces of dead pig and not very good for you. Personally, I loved it.

Ironically, we didn’t just have luncheon meat at dinnertime, but also with our tea.

I love the word ‘tea’ because, in a way, it was revenge, as we stole it from the same people who forced ‘lunch’ on us as a posh alternative to ‘dinner’.

To them, tea was something they took in the middle of the afternoon as a break from their tedious, idle lives, and it originally meant cups of tea on saucers, cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off and fancy cakes.

But as we all know, tea is really the big meal you have when you get home, hopefully consisting of bangers and mash, steak and kidney or bubble and squeak.

And what did you have after your tea?

We only ever had ‘pudding’, and only ever will, even if our kids come home with fancy ideas of copying other people they have heard calling it ‘afters’, ‘sweet’ or ‘dessert’.

I swear I also heard one of them talk about ‘brunch’ when we were holiday, which is a word I won’t tolerate under our roof, for two reasons.

Firstly, nobody needs an extra meal in the middle of the morning, between breakfast and midday, and even if they did, it would be called brinner.

Sadly, all this is only one of the symptoms of the food snobbery that undermines Britain’s greatness, and I fear we are fighting a losing battle.

But it’s food for thought.