When you’re as old and jaded as I am, you gradually come to accept that there are certain events on TV programmes and in films that just don’t happen.

The example I usually turn to is that of the ‘dance-off’ amongst disagreeing groups of people, which I have never ever ever seen anything even vaguely approximating, actually taking place out there on the streets. Lord knows I’d like it if people were more willing to settle their ideological differences by busting some funky moves on a street corner by a fire hydrant with a boom box, but unfortunately people seem more keen to use knives and guns and bombs than diplomacy or a good old-fashioned groovin’. Sigh.

Anyway, one thing which shows up in films and on TV quite a bit – and which is certainly more easy to replicate in the real world – is that of someone (usually a woman) throwing a glass of wine in the face of someone else (usually a man who’s been behaving like some kind of rotter). Aside from a story I vaguely recall from the 1980s about Anna Ford chucking wine at a TV executive who’d fired her or otherwise acted the cad in a professional sense, I have to say that I have never seen this this in real life, so I wanted to ask : have you ever seen anyone do this?

The first person I asked in this very scientific poll was m’good lady wife, who astutely observed that many people wouldn’t want to waste wine on someone they disliked that much, and would probably just throw a punch instead. I can see the logic of that.

So, can any of you report having seen a fine wine arc through the air to land on someone’s mush? Perhaps a glass of Pino Grigio was flung facewards by a friend of yours, with dry-cleaning-requiring results. If so – or if the answer’s emphatically NO – please let me know by posting a comment. I’m keen to know if this event actually occurs, or if, like ship captains performing marriage ceremonies, it’s naught but a fiction within fiction, as it were.