Sorry, but apologies really are the work of the Devil

Saying ‘sorry’ is mostly wicked and usually irrelevant, says Anna Blundy. People should not be allowed to dump their inner shame so easily

There is no end, of course, to all this human erring. And we know forgiveness is divine — look at Nelson Mandela. But, for the non-divine of us, genuine forgiveness is largely impossible. This is, in my view, because most apologies are so insincere and self-serving. And it is to the, frankly, Satanic act of apologising that I would like to turn my attention. ‘Oh, I slept with someone else. Sorry.’ ‘I hit my sister over the head with a cello bow. Sorry.’ ‘I embezzled the Christmas club money. Sorry.’ ‘I hired five prostitutes and snorted loads of cocaine. Sorry.’ See? ‘Sorry’ is almost always empty, manipulative rubbish that serves the sorrysayer and cripples the sorree.

The only circumstances in which ‘sorry’ is remotely acceptable are those in which the hurt caused is genuinely accidental or unforeseeable. So, for example, you slip and crash into someone who is in front of you in the queue for the ski lift. Or you had no idea when you slept with him that he was your sister’s boyfriend. Or you say something that you couldn’t have known was offensive because you didn’t have the requisite information (that your friend’s husband was actually raised a Christian Scientist and, though he has left the church, finds it hard to hear his beloved parents grouped with their fellow devotees as ‘a bunch of murdering psychopaths’). In any of these situations an apology is the standard way to proceed and forgiveness is likely to ensue.

But almost every time I have ever had the word ‘sorry’ inflicted on me it has seemed, in the circumstances, a deeply inappropriate thing to say. The person doing the erring knew perfectly well that his or her (almost always his) actions would inflict all kinds of damage but, deciding that the short-term pleasure would be greater than the potential (but not guaranteed) medium-term pain, he did it anyway.