At this, he harrumphed. “I don’t know about you, but I keep my hands clean at all times, especially when unloading cutlery.”

You can see how these things go. From a convivial start, cleaning up after a delightful lunch, I’m seconds from accusing him of putting others at risk of serious injury – a child, perhaps, trying to unload the machine, shredding her sweet, tiny hand – while he’s accusing me of being a germ-infested safety-Nazi.

Much of modern life is like this. Like the Lilliputians and the Blefuscudians, we divide so easily into camps.

For example, there’s the “air fryer is humanity’s biggest achievement since penicillin” crowd v the “Can you please stop filling the kitchen bench with pointless electrical gadgets?” crowd. (I’m with the latter.)

When making tea, there’s the “milk in first” crowd, who argue this allows the milk to be slowly warmed by the incoming tea, rather than being scalded when the first drops hit a sea of hot tea. Then there’s the “milk in last” crowd, who argue their method allows a better assessment of the amount of milk you may require. (I’m with the former; George Orwell was with the latter.)

Then, in the backyard, there’s the “you can only cook steaks on wood or charcoal” crowd v the proponents of “give me bottled gas any day” – a divide that remains the ultimate BBQ stopper.

In Gulliver’s Travels, a past emperor of Lilliput endured the sight of his son cutting himself when breaking the egg on the larger end and decreed that all eggs be broken on the smaller end.

Similarly, in many contemporary arguments, past experiences are quoted. And so we come to the battle over how to correctly hang a toilet roll – sometimes billed as “the debate of the Beard v the Mullet”.

Should the end of the toilet roll sit close to the wall (the mullet), or should it dangle proudly into space (the beard)?

“If it’s close to the wall, it may pick up germs from a dirty wall,” says one combatant, claiming to have heard a tale where just this happened. As with heir to the Lilliputian throne, the victim – some generations ago – was left in a sorry state.

The other side scoffs. The real problem, they say, concerns toddlers pulling at the loose end of the roll since it sits temptingly there, so easy to tug upon, the wasted paper pooling on the floor.

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The stakes could not be higher. On one side: death via germs leaping from filthy wall to blameless bum. On the other, the destruction of the Tasmanian forests, the boost to global warming, and the end of all life on Earth.

In Swift’s tale, over 40 ships are sunk, 40,000 people die, and two emperors are deposed – all due to the battle between the big-enders and the little-enders. The war is endless since both sides quote their shared Bible as proof.

Yet, writes Swift, this is a “strain upon the text; for the words are these: ‘that all true believers break their eggs at the convenient end.’”

Maybe that’s true of all these arguments. We try to reach for logic or anecdote, but it’s really all down to habit – to what your parents did or to the method upon which you first chanced.

Well, except for me. I definitely pack the dishwasher in the best possible way – with the knives and forks placed, to quote my own inner bible, always “at the convenient end”.

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