I hate feeling cross. I quite enjoy being angry sometimes. The kind of things that crop up on the Mudcat sometimes are irritations more than anything else.

I enjoy heated disagreements between friends. Most of the stuff on the Mudcat falls into that category. In Maisie Ward's biography of GK Chesterton she writes about him and his younger brother Cecil: "As soon as Cecil could speak he, began to argue and the brothers' intercourse thencweforward consisted of unending discussion. They always argued, they never quarrelled." I think that is what we should aim for, rather than trying to avoid the things about which we do not agree.

I tend to think of anger as a sort of furnace inside that keeps on getting stoked up by the irritating things that happen. Every now and then something happens where you need to turn up the heating, and the furnace means you can f0 do that. But most of the time it's just there in the background.

And I suspect that to some people that may sound very unhealthy. Never mind, it's only a metaphor, like most of the things we say about ourselves. And I can't really imagine that I'd ever see the Mudcat as a place where anger as such can be useful.