Regrets I’ve had a few by Peter Fuller

The long road I have travelled over decades has led me to the ‘great age of wonder’ – “I wonder where I have left my spectacles and I wonder why I have opened the refrigerator door”.  This life’s journey began when the world was a far simpler place, at a time when an almond meant only a nut and not also a carton of milk.

Potholes, pratfalls and pother have strewn my route, but most of these perils have been successfully side stepped.   As for regrets, these were, for the most part, born out of unrealistic aspirations and have, therefore, been solely of my own making.

At the age of fifteen I had a ‘crush’ on Julie London.  I “cried a river” that she was not mine.  If I could not have her for myself, I would have settled for being able to sing like her, a desire that was never likely to be realised.

Shortly after this I dreamed of being the footballing equivalent of Bobby Moore, Martin Peters and Geoff Hurst rolled into one.  Unfortunately, wise and experienced watchers decided that my sporting talents were better suited to Wimbledon’s third tier football.   So, rather than competing against the likes of Tottenham Hotspur’s Dave MacKaye, I would be found on Saturday afternoons facing up to the likes of ‘Butcher Beaumont’ of Streatham F.C., or ‘Leg-Breaker Latimer’ of Carshalton United.

At the age of twenty-two I would have given up everything to have walked out with flirtatious Mavis, who was plump, pink and exceptionally pretty.  She served behind the stationary counter of Woolworths in Oxford’s High Street where, for a time, half of my monthly allowances disappeared into her till.  She finally confessed to having a husband and small child at home, forcing me to withdraw my amateur advances and to buy my ballpoint pens elsewhere.

At twenty-something I was invited to join a local skiffle group to play bass guitar.  Whilst waiting to make our debut on ‘Top of the Pops’ we played with gusto in scout halls and bleak rooms above shoddy pubs.  Our career highlight was to almost play at a wedding reception.  Our drummer later suggested sullenly over a pint in Putney’s Jazz Club that the bride had probably called off her wedding when she heard that we were booked to perform.

As I neared my fortieth birthday, at an age when I really should have known better, I auditioned for the role of Count Danilo Danilovich in an amateur production of Franz Lehar’s ‘The Merry Widow’.  Amid a maelstrom of society politics, backstabbing and well-burnished egos, none of which were known to me at the time, I was eventually placed in the second row of the chorus line.  If I had been positioned any further away from the footlights I would have become part of the scenery.

Today, any regrets that this author harbours are of a purely practical nature.  For instance, I regret that when I trim my aged, claw-like toenails sparks fly from the cutter;  I rue the day that the tresses that once sprouted in an unruly fashion from the top of my head now only extrude relentlessly from my nose and ears;  and that whilst I remember in an instant that the speed of light travels at approximately 300,000 kilometres per second, I cannot immediately recall the name of my first born.

Stoically, however, I take solace in these wise words, “Never regret what you have done in your life, only regret what you have left undone”.  By following this creed, unrealistic aspirations and miscalculations become rich additions to the tapestry of a full and interesting life, pitfalls notwithstanding.