Chitra Ramaswamy

Published on Friday 10 April 2009 14:17

THIS week, a very British affliction. Shame. We spend an inordinate amount of time feeling bad about ourselves – ladies, by "we" I mean us – and I'm here to tell you that the things we feel bad about are completely and utterly pointless. We should spend less time on these niggles and more on the stuff we really are guilty of, like destroying the ozone layer.

But, ahem, back to the pointless things. We feel guilty about having too much fun. We feel guilty about having too little fun. We beat ourselves up about how fat we are, how stupid, and how likely we are to be made redundant because we are fat and stupid. We don't understand the banking crisis, we don't phone our parents enough, and we always forget to pick up milk at the supermarket. And when we do, we feel bad because the white stuff is bad for us, and some poor GM cow's teats are being overmilked to keep us in Weetabix.

It's exhausting. Last weekend I went out for lunch with friends. It was a very long lunch, lasting beyond midnight. Great fun. Yet that night I couldn't sleep because I was wracked with shame. I had overdone it, said stupid things, eaten off a stranger's plate, danced to high-energy hits from the 1990s. Sunday would be a write-off. And so it was.

I phoned my sister, as I am wont to do when I need to pass on the baton of bad feelings. Unfortunately, she was twirling her own. "Oh God," she whispered. "I've been out all weekend. I've spent all my money, I've eaten bad food… I'm a bad person." I started to feel brighter. She told me she was planning to detox – one of the side-effects of shame is a propensity to make hollow promises to oneself – and eat salad. "But everyone at work looks at my salad and I can tell they think it's too big," she wailed. It was at this point that I realised how insidious this shame business has become. We now feel bad about salad.

Something tells me this doesn't happen elsewhere in Europe. I just can't imagine Parisians freaking out about their cheese-consumption or the cheery folk of Barcelona maniacally counting the units in their cava. Here in Britain, meanwhile, it's a case of feel the shame and do it anyway.