Was my face red

I often ask myself, what was my biggest ever embarrass-ment? I can't think of any really appalling embarrass-ment, the type where you want to fall through the floor and never be seen again. But of course there are myriads of minor embarrass-ments, the sort where I feel a bit of an idiot for a few minutes and then it rapidly becomes a fading memory. To name a few:

1) Driving the wrong way round a roundabout. Yes, I actually did that, though it was only a very small roundabout so no harm done.
2) Driving the wrong way down a one-way street. I've done that several times, to a cacophony of horn-sounding from other drivers.
3) Confidently getting someone's name totally wrong. Happily calling them Rebecca when their actual name is Natalie.
4) Confidently asking after someone's children when they don't in fact have any.
5) Discovering a large and conspicuous stain on my pants after I've returned home from a very smart social event.
6) Daydreaming briefly while someone is talking to me, then finding I've lost the thread and have no idea what they're talking about.
7) Tucking into a meal at someone else's house, then noticing everyone is waiting for the host to start their meal first.
8) At someone else's house, casually opening what I think is the toilet door and finding it's a bedroom with a strange couple in mid-snog.
9) Returning home from a restaurant where the food and service were superb and realising we didn't leave a tip.
10) On my way out of an airport, discovering that in an absent-minded moment I left that brilliant book I was reading on the plane.

At least my embarrassments are usually in front of a fairly small audience and are quickly forgotten. Pity those celebs and public figures who embarrass themselves in front of an audience of thousands or even millions and never live it down because the videos will be circulating on the internet till the end of human existence.

Mountains or molehills?

People's real-life identities are very different from the ridiculous gender roles that follow us all around, but if there's one way men fit the stereotype, it's their urge to be rugged, self-sufficient individuals.

The evidence is that men are less likely to ask other people for support and tend to keep their problems to themselves, even if they're being torn apart by grief, sadness, hatred, or other extreme emotions.

It's a step forward that so many male celebs have admitted recently to their battles with depression, anxiety and other psychological issues, things that in the past they may have kept strictly under wraps, but there's still a long way to go.

It seems to me most women tend to spill out their troubles to anyone who'll listen, and their close friends for sure. They're less likely to bottle up agonising emotions and pretend everything's fine.

Certainly when I was young I conformed to the male stereotype and kept my miseries to myself. When I was bullied at school, as far as I remember I never confided in the housemaster or the head prefect or anyone who might have helped me. I guess I would have seen such an admission of weakness and helplessness as too humiliating. Men are meant to be strong and resilient and all the rest of it.

Now I have Jenny to confide in, of course I share my negative feelings with her all the time, and I'm lucky to be able to. But I still hesitate to show them to anyone else, even people I know very well. I ask myself, why would they want to listen? This is simply the emotional buffeting and turbulence of dealing with life. They'll think I'm making a big fuss over nothing.

It's not that I'm trying to be rugged and self-sufficient, just that I think I'm making mountains out of molehills. Desperate sadness? Overwhelming grief? Crushing helplessness? Who am I kidding? People out there know real distress, real trauma, not the petty emotions I'm peddling.

How am I feeling? Absolutely fine, thanks. On top of the world.

My humble apologies

I'm good at apolog-ising. I'll happily apologise for anything if it oils the wheels of a relation-ship. Be it a misunder-standing, an unintended insult, an error of fact, or an unpopular opinion, I don't mind humbling myself and admitting that maybe I got it wrong. What's the big deal about that?

But there are so many people who'll do anything rather than apologise. Apologies are apparently a huge humiliation, a huge blow to their ego, something they have to avoid at all costs.

They'll deny doing anything wrong, or find some absurd excuse or justification, or say they were only joking, or say you're over-sensitive. Anything rather than drop their pose of infallibility and admit they're only human and sometimes they drop a clanger.

My father hated apologising. No matter how obviously wrong he was about something, he would never back down. He had to be right, his authority couldn't be challenged, he couldn't bear it that I might actually know more about something than him.

I can recall several workmates who were much the same. Apologising was out of the question. It was always someone else who was wrong, not them. Any attempt to extract an apology was met with anger and incredulity.

The one thing hospital patients always ask for when they've had shoddy treatment of some kind is an apology. "I just want them to admit they got it wrong and they have to do better" they'll say. And the one thing the hospital invariably won't do is apologise. They'll prevaricate and obfuscate and do anything to avoid simply saying "We're really sorry, we made a mess of this and it's not good enough."

And while I'm at it, I sincerely apologise for all those nonsensical, long-winded, infantile, pedantic blog posts I've churned out over the last seven years. If there's anything I can do to make amends, just say the word. You've no idea how ashamed and stupid and careless I feel. What a total dufus I've been. What a total toss-bucket. I promise to do much much better in the future.

Rare emotion

It was a surprise to realise I can't recall a single time in my adult life when I've felt humiliated. Humiliation is not an emotion I'm prone to.

To feel humiliated, I would have to feel that my fundamental sense of self-worth had been shattered, and that has never been the case. However serious the situation, whatever its personal impact, it has never been enough to destroy my belief in myself.

I might feel insulted, or rejected, or got-at, or belittled, or unappreciated, but never humiliated. That would be too extreme a reaction.

There was one particular occasion when I was working in a bookshop and my boss jumped on me for being late for work. Not only was I formally disciplined but my trade union colleagues didn't support me. I could have felt humiliated, but the way I was treated didn't affect my underlying self-esteem. I didn't feel I'd done anything seriously reprehensible or irresponsible. So I never felt more than victimised and isolated and unlucky.

There was another occasion at Newark Airport, New York, when a zealous security official emptied out the entire contents of my suitcase in front of dozens of other travellers. She was happily rummaging through my underwear and personal possessions, searching for God knows what. But I didn't feel humiliated. Her intrusive rummaging didn't damage my self-respect. I felt embarrassed and awkward and exposed but that was it.

Maybe if she'd discovered a stack of porn mags or a corset or a copy of Mein Kampf. But she didn't.

My childhood was a different matter. My father would routinely humiliate me by suggesting I was stupid or lazy or cruel or selfish and my self-worth was being battered every day of the week. The same applied at boarding school where I was bullied persistently for four years. Thankfully that sort of merciless denigration stopped when I moved out of the family home and got a place of my own.

Given my treatment as a child, it's strange that at some point my self-esteem became quite solid and hard to shake. I don't need constant reassurance that I'm a worthwhile person. I believe in my own values and attitudes and I don't constantly doubt myself. I may be endlessly anxious, but it's not my own self I'm anxious about.

Poor kids

Some things are just seen as too depressing and upsetting to dwell on. Okay, mention them briefly if you must so we know about them, but then push them away quickly into a dark corner while we focus on something more cheerful.

The number of children living in poverty is one such dreary scenario. Yes, 3½ million British children don't have enough food, clothes, toys, holidays at the seaside, or a dry and warm place to live.

They're miserable for years on end. They feel permanently disheartened and constricted by their living conditions. Telling their schoolmates what their home is like is humiliating. They can't see any way of improving things. They hate the wealthy families who take for granted they can have virtually anything they want. One in six of them have considered suicide.

Yet the rest of us tend to ignore them. Very sad, of course, terrible that in a so-called advanced country like the UK so many children are trapped in such dreadful conditions. But there's little you and I can do about it, it's up to the politicians to put it right and why don't they? There's no point in rubbing our noses in it every day, it just makes us squirm.

It's odd though that while poverty-stricken kids are swept out of sight, children who go missing or are violently attacked get huge headlines day after day. Why do these tragedies grip us so unshakeably yet the tragedy of poverty doesn't? Why has Madeleine McCann had such colossal coverage while little Tracey in her worn-out shoes and threadbare coat gets barely a mention?

Poverty is still treated the way cancer used to be. It's too awful to contemplate. And it might be contagious. Take it away quickly, it's putting me off my cornflakes.