Among my family were many who struggled to get through a week without taking umbrage at some piddling thing and wishing the offender one way or another to damnation.

They did a good deal of internalising. They practised long silences. In subtle ways this constant exercise of pride probably held the family together - at least what remained of it when the unworthy had been banished. Anthropologists long ago observed the same principle in what used to be called primitive societies. It is functional after a fashion, and often funny after the event. But it is rarely fun at the time.

By way of example, while riding the eight kilometres that separated his half-cleared 40 hectares from the nearest town, a grandfather of mine convinced himself that a Mrs H had slighted him outside the general store. He already suspected the woman of flattering herself that the few sheep she and her husband ran put them in a rank above people like him who milked cows.

Construing something "superior' in her expression when he had raised his hat to her that afternoon, very soon after he was at the mercy of his pride. As he rode home, the poison thickened in his blood, and by the time he got inside his house it had gripped him like a python. No sooner did he sit down for a cup of tea than he rose again, slapped his hat back on his head and, telling his sons to get on with the milking, fairly flew out the door. For the boys watching from the porch that late afternoon, the sight of their father flashing between the gum-trees as he galloped down the road that led back to town and the residence of Mrs H became a permanent memory.