Monday 16th April

It is strange but you only regret those things you did not do.  Things you did, which obviously turn out to be mistakes or serious errors of judgment are brushed aside as not important, or something to learn from or all part of life’s trials and tribulations.  You never really regret things you have done, no matter how awful.  Maybe murderers regret killing their victims, but this may actually be remorse, which is different from regret, or regretting that having killed their victim they got caught, regretting that they did not dispose of the body more carefully perhaps, or that they had chosen a messy method, or more likely that they hadn’t done it sooner.

It is the things we do not do, the things we neglected to do; the choices we did not make that we regret not the ones we chose.  I can honestly say that I do not regret anything.  Possibly I could have tried harder to reconcile Grandma to my leaving home, or that I had taken my mother more seriously than I did all those years ago, but actually I think it would have made little difference.  No the things I regret are mostly abstract, like learning to play the piano, the love of which I only discovered in my mid-teens and it all seemed to late by then, or persevering with my painting which I hated at school, daubing away with bright unsubtle colours at still-life bowls of fruit, when with some real application I feel I might have achieved something; I always knew what I wanted the picture to look like, I just never had the materials to achieve it.  Like that line by Fairground Attraction, “like threading a needle with boxing gloves”.  I do regret not writing earlier in life too, but again that is a bit abstract.

I was once offered a course on computer programming by that Hotel I met Adrian in, they were looking for bright young people to set up the computers in their head office in Edinburgh.  But this was in 1972 and computers filled a whole room in those days and were in their infancy and no-one could imagine their ubiquity now.  But in all honesty I do not regret it.