THIS week I have mostly been getting in touch with my inner anger.

Just so you know, this is going to be one of those columns where I get a lot of stuff off my chest, for purely selfish, writing-is-therapy reasons.

If I were you I'd stop reading right now. Go and find Brian Carter's nice page. It'll be much better for your nerves. Nothing to see here. Move along please folks. It's all going to get a bit messy and there has already been a lot of bad language in the office.

Health warning over. If you're still reading, don't blame me.

To be truthful, getting in touch with my inner Mrs Angry has been great fun. I prefer being Mrs Angry to Mrs Mournful or Mrs Sullen. My Mrs Angry is what the Americans would call 'a spunky girl'. And she's a million times more fun to be around than Mrs Fake Smiley or drippy Mrs 'Oh-I'm-OK-really-I-supoose'.

Nothing valuable has been broken (the work blackberry-thingy hadn't been working properly since Christmas anyway. So that's a good thing, surely?) There has been only the one slammed door (for which I apologised profusely) and all my relationships have survived intact.

The problem with being female, and with being a middle child, and with growing up in the 1960s, and with being a convent school educated Catholic — in fact the problem with being me — is that I'm a good girl. Sweet, smiley, eager to please, Colleen. I'm nice (most of the time).

You can see by my Croft Lodge school photo in the summer of 1973, what a sweetie I once was.

But it means that when people are not nice to me, I don't really know how to react. Mostly, I just smile and walk away and trust to Karma.

Which actually works just fine, most of the time. So long as you're happy to see the long term and the bigger picture, it's quite interesting to observe how people get what they deserve... usually... in the end. It probably helps if you believe in reincarnation, because sometimes it can look as if the rotters have all the fun/money/success/sex in this life. Maybe sometimes you just have to accept that some people have to wait for their next life to get their just desserts.

The other drawback to being nice is that people act so shocked when you finally get pushed over the edge and behave like them... selfish, bad-tempered, normal, human. They get all 'Oooo. What's up with Colleen?' And then they start shouting. Usually they shout 'you're shouting' but because they shout all the time and I never shout they miss the irony of shouting at me for shouting back at them.

There. Got that off my chest. I'm liking being in touch with my inner anger. It's producing feelings of inner calm.

I first realised that I needed to get in touch with my inner anger in a Cardiff nightclub last Wednesday night.

I had a morning meeting with my middle daughter about her university course and because Wales was still in the grip of The Big Freeze (you wouldn't think that was only a week ago would you?) I drove up, carefully, the night before.

And that meant I got to spend a lovely evening with my lovely daughter in lovely Cardiff. Because of the snow we got a table without even having to book at Jamie Oliver's Italian restaurant.

It was truly splendid and very reasonable (or it would have been if we hadn't ordered a bottle of fizzy Prosecco).

After our meal she wanted me to meet all her nice new friends and they talked me into going to a nightclub for a dance. We were having a lovely time dancing to cheesy music, until a boy decided to put his hand up my skirt.

Now, if you're a girl with a curvy posterior, like me, you get used to men making comments, and the odd pat now and again, without taking too much offence. But this was more than that. Basically, he stuck his hand up my bum.

So I turned around and poured my glass of ice-cold water over his head, which felt like the appropriate response. I think he thought so too, because he blinked a bit, but didn't say a word.

His friends however, and my daughter and her friends, who hadn't witnessed the hand up the skirt incident, stood around looking completely shocked. They later agreed that, given the circumstances, my action wasn't at all out of order.

Once again, it felt good.

It was about two nights later, at 3am as I lay in bed worrying about the pain in my chest, that I realised the tense feeling was my inner anger.

And ever since I've been letting it out. This mainly involves swearing like a potty-mouthed trooper in the office all day. And it's helping. The pain in my chest has subsided and I have started realising what I'm really angry about (which is a whole other story!)