Brian Viner: Own up. You'll feel better for it

Why confess if you can get away with it? Well, for a very good reason...

'Tis the season for confessions, it seems. My own confession is that I long ago resolved never to open a column in the month of December with the words 'tis the season, so I must firstly offer a full and heartfelt apology to myself.

The only thing worse than starting a column in the run-up to Christmas by venturing that 'tis the season to be something or other, is to start a column relating in any way to Jane Austen with the words "it is a truth universally acknowledged that..." This is a smarty-pants journalistic flourish that needs to be consigned to the dustbin of history. Come to think of it, maybe room could also be found in the dustbin of history for the "dustbin of history"? History isn't a dustbin. It's a fascinating and endlessly useful repository of human experiences, which brings me right back to confessions.

Yesterday it was reported that Sylvia Blampey, a 77-year-old widow from Paignton in Devon, recently went into a department store in Reading, Berkshire, and handed over £20, explaining that in 1971 she had bought three blankets there, which should have cost £9, yet she was charged only £3. She decided not to tell – yet for the next 38 years she could not shake the episode from her conscience. So finally she went back to the store, which fortuitously is still in business, and paid the £6 plus interest that only she knew she owed.

This, of course, is the purest form of confession, the confession prompted not by circumstance but by conscience, without which none of us would be any the wiser. In short, if you can get away with it then why confess? Mrs Blampey has supplied the answer.

Professional sport, where cheating is now endemic, is a convenient vehicle for examining the morality of the confession. In the 1920s the great amateur golfer Bobby Jones was commended for calling a penalty on himself, having accidentally touched the ball when unobserved, deep in the rough. "You might as well praise a man for not robbing a bank," he replied, and the same uncomplicated code of ethics still prevails on the golf course, by and large, but off the course golf, and indeed the entire sporting world, has been rocked by another form of cheating, by Tiger Woods on his wife.

Tiger's confession was the opposite kind to Mrs Blampey's. True, he didn't wait quite as long to make it as she did, but unlike hers, it had nothing to do with conscience and everything to do with circumstance. The same was true of the French footballer Thierry Henry. When Henry confessed to having handled the ball in the lead-up to the goal in a World Cup qualifier that knocked out the Republic of Ireland, he was being reactive rather than proactive. As a consequence of mucking up their confessions, perhaps more than their actual transgressions, these two abundantly gifted sportsmen are now global joke figures.

Literally so. On Monday I was at a swanky charity lunch in London, and one of the speakers told us he had good news and bad news. The good news was that Peter Mandelson had decided to emigrate. The bad news was that Tiger Woods was driving him to the airport. And I confess; I laughed.

b.viner@independent.co.uk