Daily Mail 28.2.12
Show me the person who has no regrets and I’ll show you either a devil or a saint. But most probably I’ll show you someone with absolutely no imagination. Because having regrets, that ability to look back at our lives and reflect on choices made, actions taken and things said or unsaid, is part of what makes us human.
So when I read yesterday that, according to a survey, most of us spend almost three quarters of an hour a week pondering our missed chances and the wrong roads taken, my first thought was “only three quarters of an hour? What’s everyone doing for the rest of the week?”
We all share these ramblings of the mind, often in the sleepless wee small hours, when we latch on to some incident from decades ago, and then tie ourselves in knots re-evaluating it and wondering what might have happened if we’d done one thing instead of another.
For instance, Sunday was a lovely day in London, and, as I was sitting out in the unexpected sunshine, I remembered another sunny early spring day in 1961 when I’d been a student.
One lunchtime I’d got to talk to a beautiful French girl and when she told me she had nothing to do, I’d skipped lectures and spent an idyllic afternoon climbing the Monument in London with her. I was instantly in love, but, because I didn’t have the nerve to ask her out. I never saw her again. That day is as fresh in my mind as yesterday. And it’s always been a regret that I was so shy.
Then there was my night that never was with Maria Schneider. She was soon to become famous as the young star of the erotic Marlon Brando film Last Tango In Paris, but when I met her, she was just a very pretty French girl with a puppy dog face.
Should I have gone back to that flat with her and the other young actress for the little party they suggested? Obviously not, so it’s not quite a regret, but… Well, a fellow couldn’t help wondering when he saw so much of her in her famous film the following year.
Girls and boys. They’re what make the young world go round. So it isn’t surprising that 20 per cent of us are said to have regrets about our romances, which is clearly reflected in the high incidence of divorce. But family life can cause just as much, if not a great deal more, real heart searching.
When my children were small I was loaned a movie camera to take on holiday to Portugal, and, because I didn’t really know how to operate it, and was very busy when I got home, I never got around to having the film processed.
The reels have since been lost, meaning that although I have thousands of still photographs of the children, there are no home movies of them showing the way they were that summer, learning to swim and playing games on the beach. I’m sure the film wouldn’t have been very good, but it would have existed. It was my own stupid fault and nothing I can do will put it right. That’s a real regret.
As is the fact that although I spent years armed with a tape recorder interviewing very famous people, it never occurred to me to record my own mother’s voice. I don’t know why I didn’t. I just took her for granted. And now it’s too late.
When I was making my career she was, like all mothers, very proud of me, but, again, I was always busy, not realising that she would perhaps have liked to have spent more time with me…perhaps just with me alone.
When she got very old she lived alone on the South Coast, a two and a half hour drive away. I went to see her, obviously. But not as often as I could have done and wish I had done. She was lonely. I let her down. That’s my biggest regret.
But there are small regrets, too, that I can’t undo. I used to bump into an old and good friend from university from time to time when we would always plan to get together for a night out to reminisce. Then one day I got a phone call from his widow. He’d died unexpectedly from a heart attack.
Like many people of my generation I’ve had an incredibly lucky life. I don’t regret, as apparently many do, not working harder at school. I did just enough to get to university where I did just enough to get a degree, which always seemed to me to be the right balance.
But it’s been a lifetime sadness that I never took the time to learn the guitar and play in a band – any band. That being said I could easily have started guitar lessons later in life but somehow never bothered, so whose fault is that?
When I finally realised I wasn’t as good a runner as I used be, I began to wish I’d taken part in at least one marathon, just to test myself. But, again, how honest am I being? I’d had years to do it and could never be bothered to even start training.
I’ve always been hopeless with money, too, never paying enough attention, if you want to know, because the work I do always seemed so much more interesting. So I suppose I’m not as well off as I could have been, something, which, in the darkest hours can chide me. But that’s probably me just being greedy. Most people, I would imagine, would think I’ve done all right.
Like everybody, I’ve made some unwise career choices, though they didn’t seem foolish at the time. But then, isn’t that the problem with regretting anything. Only in retrospect can we see the mistakes we think we made and imagine the road not travelled. And even then how honest are we really being with ourselves?
For instance, let’s return to the French girl I took up the Monument. What if I had asked her out and she’d turned me down, as I probably thought she might? That would have been a dagger in my heart for ever.
Alternatively, what if she’d said “yes”, and we’d gone out together, and on better acquaintance I’d discovered that she wasn’t quite as perfect as I’d imagined. The result would have been that I’d have forgotten her, as I’ve forgotten other girls, and I’d have missed the bittersweet daydream of never knowing. And believe me I have enjoyed that daydream.
In the film It’s A Wonderful Life the James Stewart character is driven to the brink of suicide, thinking that all the life choices he made were a mistake. Then up pops his guardian angel, Clarence, to save his life and show him how things would have been if he’d never existed, and how all kinds of little decisions he’d made helped make his world a better place. Maybe we all need a guardian angel to point this out to us sometimes.
It’s often said that you don’t regret what you’ve done, only what you haven’t done. There’s much truth in this. But we have to be careful with some of those night-time self-reproaches, the ones that point to the other gloriously successful lives we might have had. Because, in truth, they’re often just pipe dreams that vanish with the morning.
We only ever know for certain the consequences of what we did. And although we like to paint for ourselves the rosiest of pictures of the road not travelled, we can never be sure. It might have led to disaster. And basically we did what we did because we are who we are, for good and bad.
Not that we don’t wonder. But that’s because we’re human.
