It’s amazing what you can find out about yourself by poking a stick up your nose.

Or - in the case of another set of results I’ve just received - from spitting in a cup.

While the 2020s have brought us tiresome LFTs and PCRs, if you take the DNA ancestry test, you are sure to find out something more interesting about yourself.

And my results are just in.

Years of conventional genealogical research suggested that whatever words you might choose to describe the Carters, ‘exotic’ isn’t one of them.

Even though we have traced parts of the tree back eight or nine generations, literally everybody in my bloodline was born in England.

I tell a lie: a handful popped over the border into Wales at one stage, only to come back ‘home’ again, a few years later, but that is hardly an excuse to break out into Land of My Fathers.

This kind of racial purity might appeal to people with a narrow outlook on life, but not me.

So I pinned my hopes on one of my grandmothers being from Celtic stock, even though it was based on the most circumstantial of evidence: she was born in Gateshead, which is up north, and her father’s name (Robert Wilson) sounded a bit Scottish.

I can now reveal that the ‘ethnicity estimate’ from my DNA shows, not surprisingly, that three-quarters of me belongs to ‘central and southern England’, and my ancestors weren’t inclined to move far from home, being almost exclusively from Wiltshire and those bits of other counties that are close to Swindon.

But there is finally something more foreign to report.

My DNA is 14 per cent Scottish, which has surely been passed down through my grandmother, after all, bless her.

And then there are the fractions showing traces of the peoples we learned about in junior school.

I am four per cent ‘Germanic Europe’, which must be my Saxon blood.

And I am another four per cent Swedish/Danish, plus two per cent Norwegian, which is surely the Viking in me.

But while I’ve always suspected that the shape of my nose, the fact that I tan very easily, and my romantic nature, not to mention my prowess as a passionate lover (no, really) must be evidence of Roman blood flowing in my veins - alas: not a drop.

Nor Irish blood either, which is a blow.

But at least the results, which are incredibly detailed and accurate, have not released any skeletons from cupboards.

Stories are rife about people who have innocently taken the test, only to find that the connections they had made in their family tree and even to living relatives were based on false assumptions of paternity.

Ouch.

So it does require a little bravery, but I recommend you try it.

Although it isn’t cheap, it is good value for money, I reckon.

Especially if, like me, you come from a long line of poor skinflints and you have a twin brother who is willing to pay for it.