In a world already full of almost infinite peril and danger, it’s dispiriting to know that, actually, there is another mortal hazard that we’d been underestimating all along. Biscuits.

This week, a report relayed the alarming news that more than recession, swine flu, God’s wrath and global-warming-thingy, it is a simple packet of Rich Tea we should really be fearing. More than half of all Britons, it told us, borderline unbelievably, have been injured by biscuits. Insults to the flesh range from being scalded by hot tea or coffee while dunking, to breaking a tooth.

An estimated 25 million adults have been injured while eating during a tea or coffee break, with at least 500 landing themselves in hospital. Putting this into perspective, this makes having a biccie a more perilous activity than pot-holing, drag-racing, waterfall-punching, or auto-asphyxiation in a hotel room at 4am, off your face on minibar Bacardi Breezers.

For those who, now querulous, wish to keep their biscuit-risk to a minimum, it is useful to note that the Custard Cream is apparently the most dangerous biscuit, with a rigorously scientific-looking Biscuit Injury Threat Evaluation rating of 5.63. It’s practically a sandwich made of guns. The Jaffa Cake, meanwhile — you may be soothed to note — scores, in comparison, a mere 1.16; making it the safest biscuit to offer to a child, or a congenital idiot.

Apart from wondering where the hell the Daily Mail has been in drawing attention to this threat to the fabric of society — whither the “BROKEN BISCUITS BRITAIN: BOURBONS GIVE HOUSE PRICES CANCER” headlines? — this does raise several questions. 1) How have all the old people stayed alive so long, when all they live on is biscuits, tea and Spam? 2) Will the Fox’s Biscuit Selection tins now be renamed “Fox’s Russian Roulette”? 3) When the average office meeting is enlivened by the half-time arrival of a plate of assorted ginger nuts, digestives, choc-chip and wafer, is this not, in the light of this new research, little better than the Rev Jim Jones bringing in refreshing beakers of Kool Aid for everyone?

Most importantly of all, however, could any research have fed more assiduously into what Americans think of life in Britain is like? While Americans get injured and die from things like being shot by gangsters, stampeded by bison, exploding in state-of-the-art $1.7 billion space rockets, and overdosing on new drug-crazes that we won’t even get in Britain until 2025, here in sleepy old Englandlandland, we’re off to A&E after an unfortunate incident with a gingerbread man; issuing a rueful, “What-ho! Rather overdid it during a high-tea frenzy, pip pip” as we go through the swinging doors. We might just as well rename The Ten O’Clock News, A Newsletter of Unfortunate Occurrences in Trumpton.

At this new low point, then, in being regarded as “kinda cute” by the most powerful nation on Earth, it might be instructive for us to consider all the other ways in which Americans imagine that here in Britain we regularly “come a right cropper” in our tiny, clockwork, weather-obsessed, four-inch-wide island, situated somewhere off the coast of New Zealand, I guess. I dunno. I dropped out in Fourth Grade.

1) Bonnet cupboard collapsing on to head.

2) Bustle getting chivvied by postillion.

3) Being spanked, to the point of mortification, by Dame Judi Dench 4) Being run over by a carriage in Lie-chester Square.

5) Getting perilously close to having your knackers lasered off by an evil arch-nemesis (James Bond only).

6) While looking at the town hall in an average Georgian market, having a perspective on “Too much history” leads our brains to fatally overload, causing irreparable neural damage.

7) Being badly chafed by thatch.

8) Being the subject of a bon mot by Oscar Wilde so cutting, you have to go into exile in Paris, and go into a decline on a diet of unfamiliar foreign salamis and liqueurs.

9) Rookery becomes pestilent, and causes “the vapours”.

10) Tweeds get overstarched by “the help”, legs kept in permanent stasis cause thrombosis.

11) Having teeth so hideously snaggled, peggled, irregular, discoloured and random — essentially like the Sarlac Pit in Return of the Jedi — that we regularly, on saying particularly long sentences, accidentally eat our own faces.

12) Being taken outside and MURDERED by the NHS on our 60th birthdays, as part of a socialist, irreligious dystopian nightmare, from which there is only one possible method of deliverance: rowing the entirety of the UK across the Atlantic, like a canoe, and somehow glueing it to somewhere with infinitely better social values. Such as Alabama.

13) A monster rampaging across the land, in much the same manner as Cloverfield, or The Blob. Unfortunately, however, the first person to realise that there is a monster abroad is Hugh Grant, and his attempt to alert the authorities is so stuttery, dilatory and crippled by prep-school spankings and poshness that, by the time he has relayed the full scale of the emergency facing Britain, everyone south of Humberside has died.

I tell you what, though. The more I think of it, the prouder I am of living in a country where we collate statistics on biscuit-related injuries. We don’t have poisonous snakes, earthquakes, volcanoes, deadly spiders that live under the toilet seat, a broiling underclass living in a shanty town on the outskirts of our capital city, Robert Mugabe as president, Osama bin Laden living in a cave, or a 26 per cent infection rate of HIV. Instead, the greatest threat to our green and pleasant land is a simple, moistened digestive.

Yes, it might confirm every ridiculous cliché about our country held by tourists in garish Hawaiian shirts, brandishing gigantic camcorders and looking for our Prime Minister, Dr Sherlock Holmes. But look at real truth behind these statistics. We are a nation-breed committed to our elevenses — regardless of the adrenalising, almost alluring possibility of total death.

We’re willing to risk it all for a HobNob. And that, surely, is the indomitable, Dunk*-irk spirit that has made this country great.

*Did you see what I did there?

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