Who needs grudges?

I don't understand people who hold grudges. Especially when they hold grudges not just for days but for years on end. What on earth do they achieve from it?

My father formed a grudge against me when I was 22 and didn't speak to me for 20 years. He wouldn't even let me into his house, so I had to see my mother at a local pub. There was no reasoning with him.

The grudge may be based on a complete misunderstanding of someone's words or actions, but they won't be corrected. They get some sort of emotional satisfaction from shutting the person out or refusing to treat them in a normal courteous fashion.

People are left out of wills in favour of the local dogs' home or some distant relative who is somehow seen as more deserving. People aren't invited to social gatherings or they're constantly abused and insulted behind their backs.

I've never held a grudge against anyone. Yes, there are people who've treated me badly or shunned me for no obvious reason, but I just put it down to "human error" and get on with my life. I don't want all that negative emotion festering away inside me.

Grudges can have such destructive consequences. From Putin having a long-standing grudge about the break-up of the Soviet Union to the next-door neighbour persisting with some convoluted boundary dispute to a local council hounding you for painting your door the wrong colour (this is currently happening to Miranda Dickson in Edinburgh).

There are plenty of people I could hold grudges against, but I'm just not going to waste my time and energy on them.

Flimsy memories

Memories are so slippery. We think we remember an event so clearly, so accurately, yet someone else who was there will tell us we got it all wrong and it wasn't like that at all.

The police know all too well how fallible our memory is. If you talk to ten witnesses of a car accident, they'll all say something different. They can't agree on the car's speed, what happened, the weather, even the driver's gender.

My memory of an event often clashes with Jenny's, or one of us doesn't recall it at all. Do you remember that blonde in the miniskirt who pinched our taxi, I ask? She was dark-haired and wearing trousers, says Jenny. And she didn't pinch our taxi, she shared it. Okay, so something's got scrambled somewhere.

Sometimes I wonder just how reliable any of my memories are. How much of my life is a complete myth based on decades of gradually mangled recollections and how much is the truth? Did that wild night of sex with Caroline at the age of 19 actually happen or did she push me out of the door and say she never wanted to see me again?

People can nurse grievances for years over the way someone treated them, when their memory may be getting it all wrong. One reason I never breed grievances is that I can't be sure those abusive remarks or that hostile brush-off really happened. I may have dreamt the whole thing.

And at my age I think some memories have started to merge with things I've read or seen on TV. I remember so vividly that nightmare drive through torrential rain to visit an ailing girlfriend. Or is that just a classic episode from an early Ian McEwan novel?

I've learnt to treat my memories with caution, and bear in mind they may be no more reliable than a drunkard's hard luck story.

The complainer

It puzzles me when someone complains constantly about their partner but never seriously tackles the problems - or ends the relationship

I had a workmate once who moaned at every opportunity about her husband's intolerable behaviour. He did things without consulting her, he was always coming home drunk, he spent too much time working, he bottled up his emotions, and on and on.

The rest of us would listen patiently and sympathise, and then ask her what she was doing to resolve the drunkenness, overwork or whatever. Invariably she would say it was pointless to confront him because he wouldn't listen or that was just the way he was or he had his faults but he had his virtues too.

We would hear her out politely, then give her advice on how to change his behaviour. Tell him what he's doing is seriously distressing her, tell him he's immature and inconsiderate, or even tell him to shape up or ship out.

But no matter what we said to her, she took no notice and simply let him carry on as before, upsetting her again and again and prompting more complaints whenever she had an available ear to express them to.

Why was she so passive? I could never work it out. Maybe she had a masochistic streak and liked being badly treated. Or she was too timid to stand up to him effectively. Or she couldn't stand the aggression of a serious row. Or she was afraid of his violent retaliation. Or maybe she just liked playing the aggrieved victim and getting everyone's sympathy.

Whatever the cause, she let this flawed relationship drift on month after month and left the rest of us feeling exasperated and bemused by her feebleness. We wanted to wade in on her behalf and tell her useless husband exactly what we thought of him.

Whether she ever did end the relationship I don't know as I changed jobs and never saw her again. But I hope she eventually found the courage to break this sterile cycle.