I spent years with an upper class hunk – watching Disney’s Rivals reminds me why I’m glad I didn’t ‘marry up’, and picked a normal man instead!

My new boyfriend’s granny settled herself into her armchair, poured me a hefty glass of single malt, and leaned in for a ‘little chat’.

‘So tell me, my dear,’ she said, taking my hand in her gnarly, bejewelled one. ‘Do you young ladies still ride side saddle nowadays?’

I nearly spat my drink into my glass, as my boyfriend guffawed into the bookcase. She wasn’t being mischievous, she genuinely wanted to be brought up to speed on the preferred riding style of women in their 20s, as things had ‘moved on so much since she was a debutante’. She considered it a worthy conversation opener with her grandson’s latest flame.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I didn’t ride side saddle, or any saddle. I’d never really ridden a horse, unless being led astride a pony, aged ten, on a camping holiday in Wales counted. The closest I’d ever got to horse riding was going to the bookies, on behalf of my granddad, to place a bet.

In the end I simply went along with it, for the sport: ‘No, I don’t,’ I said in a voice that didn’t sound like mine. ‘And a jolly good thing too, it looks frightfully uncomfortable,’ as my boyfriend backed out the room, doubled up with laughter.

Oh, how I adored ‘Posh Granny’. She never failed to remind me of the totally different world I’d stepped into during the two years when I – a working-class, comprehensive-educated girl from a grotty seaside town in the south of England – dated a Debrett’s-listed member of the aristocracy, in the early 1990s.

It’s a world that some are enjoying with the TV adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s outrageous 1988 ‘bonkbuster’ Rivals, which explores the machinations and pleasures of the rich horsey set.

Although I never played naked tennis with a Conservative minister, or joined the Mile High Club on Concorde a la Rivals, it was an interesting, fun-filled two years, Anonymous writes

Although I can’t say I ever played naked tennis with a Conservative minister, or joined the Mile High Club on Concorde a la Rivals, it was an interesting, fun-filled two years that ultimately ended with us going back to our respective worlds.

He accepted a job abroad, which put us in an impossible position. To join him, for visa reasons, I would have had to marry him, and I think both of us realised that wasn’t something that would work.

Yet why? These were the supposed glory days of social mobility. Just a year earlier, in 1990, south London grammar school boy John Major had entered Downing Street promising a ‘classless society’.

Ultimately, however, my ex and I simply were not compatible. It went way beyond ‘napkin not serviette’ niceties, our different backgrounds meant we were so out of sync on many fundamental issues.

Dating outside one’s class shouldn’t matter, but sadly it normally always does – even if nobody likes to admit it.

Statistics tend to back up how much class is still quietly at the controls in the UK. Those who thought relationship class issues were confined to Austen’s time, will be surprised to hear that even today, people tend to marry their own kind.

Alex Hassel, who plays Rupert Campbell-Black, and Pasqualino in the hit show

A report by Institute for Public Policy Research showed that 45 per cent of women born in 1970 married someone from the same social class as them. Thirty-two per cent ‘married up’ and 23 per cent married down. A generation later, the first figure was up to 56 per cent – with just 16 per cent ‘going up’ and 28 per cent lowering their sights.

My ex and I had met at work – that great leveller – although he arrived with an expensive education and a cut-glass accent. What attracted us was good-old chemistry. I’d never met anyone like him before, whereas his family had only ever employed people like me.

To be fair, his family were lovely to me, although, when I look back, it did have an unsavoury tang of My Fair Lady about it. My ex adored talking me through the dos and don’ts and expectations of a shooting weekend on the family estate.

And his old school friends, all with nicknames like Bilbo, Whiffy or Nobby, regarded me as a passing fancy at best. One did actually make a shocking pass at me once.

My ex’s old school friends, all with nicknames like Bilbo, Whiffy or Nobby, regarded me as a passing fancy at best, Anonymous writes. One did actually make a shocking pass at me once

Their attitude to women in general set off alarming warning bells. They didn’t seem to have girl ‘friends’. Girls were divided into three categories: those they wanted to sleep with, and those they’d consider marriage material – and the rest were simply invisible. I was most definitely Category One.

The family had a ski lodge in the Alps, and would spend every Christmas and Easter there. There was a certain lip balm he used on the trip and when – aged seven – he was packed off to boarding school, it was this reassuring lip balm he’d sniff under the bed covers at night, as he tried so hard to be a brave boy and not cry.

He just couldn’t understand my horror at the story.

He thought it was cute, and of course he insisted he’d do the same with his son (note: son, not daughter). Boarding school would be, he insisted, the making of him.

His sister, however, was not sent away to school, instead attending a much cheaper private day school. Again, when I dared to ask why, he simply shrugged and said it was the family way. She was expected to marry well, and not have to trouble herself with a career.

A year after we broke up, I met my husband: a grammar school boy, with an electrician father and mother who worked as a nurse, just like me. We’ve been married 25 years.

I’ll never regret my time with my Posh Boy. I saw online that he’d married a hearty, ruddy-cheeked gal, who looked like she could wring a pheasant’s neck with one hand, while pouring a Martini with the other. I’m sure they’re very happy.

As for him and me? It was never meant to be.