Despite the years of therapy, Doris still felt tremendous guilt when clandestinely eating chocolate.

I was walking to the local shops the other day – a journey of two minutes – to buy bread or fresh chicken for a curry, or possibly I needed batteries for my front bike-light, I don’t remember. I’d just rounded the corner by the post office when I was overcome by a pervading paralysis. It’s happened to me before and on many occasions. It starts in the heart with a jolt – the kind of sinking feeling you get when you realise you’ve locked your keys in the house or forgotten to feed your neighbour’s cat for the third day running – and spreads to the stomach; then comes the dizzying swirl of blood in the head and the accompanying prickly flush to the skin. It’s very debilitating. I’m sure that passers-by can see my cringing posture: my limbs tensed and my face contorted into some comic semi-rictus. Sometimes I might be standing at the bus stop waiting for a number 3 or 4 to take me to town; I could be loading the dryer with freshly laundered underwear, or I could be doling out alms to the local homeless. No matter what I might be doing at the time, I’m feeling guilty.

I’m always feeling guilty. But I don’t bear the great burden of a monstrous crime or a malicious wrongdoing. I have not embezzled an old lady out of her life savings or tortured a defenceless animal in the name of sport. I have not abdicated my responsibilities and abandoned an impregnated lover to face the world alone. I should be guilt-free, but I’m not.

I’m feeling guilty now: quite by chance I bumped into a long-lost university friend who is now living a few miles out of town. We went for a coffee and caught up on the events of the intervening years and agreed that we should keep in contact.

He called last Wednesday to see if I’d to go to the Tracy Emin exhibition that’s heralding the re-opening of the newly refurbished modern art gallery in town. I told him to call me Saturday morning to arrange a time we could both go. Well, he did call, but I was still languishing naked in bed and suggested that we make a date for Sunday. His voice took on a distinct air of disappointment as he offered an alternative mid-week visit. I realise now that he had taken it as understood that we would go today and, that in effect, I had stood him up. I feel guilty.

The primary causes of my guilt are, like this example, simple faux pars and social ineptitudes or, less regularly, things I did or said years ago and would never say or do today.

Why do I still feel guilty to this day about not contacting a friend when I went home to visit my parents last Christmas because I was feeling to ill, or not remembering a family birthday five years ago? I don’t feel guilty about my attempts to cremate a friend’s houseplant with the aid of a cigarette lighter and a can of deodorant at a rather drunken party. So why should I still worry about the hurtful things I might have said in the throes of an acrimonious break-up? I should be able to let it go – other people do.

While others seemingly go through life without any outward sense of conscience, I endure woeful regret at the most innocuous details of everyday life. Am I neurotic?

But I had a terrible realisation this afternoon: maybe I don’t feel guilty, maybe I feel embarrassed. Now that’s an altogether different emotion.