It's perfectly normal to have regrets

Gazing through the heartless face paint, a 50-year-old woman trying to be 40 says: "I don't regret anything."

This has become the mantra of our age; many of us have forgotten how to regret. Are you listening, Edith Piaf?

I regret almost everything: going to the matric dance looking like a Voortrekker wagon. That I encouraged drama and pain. That, teetering on a rope of comic fantasies, grandeur and self-pity, I got up on a stage at a nightclub and did an improvised dance that involved self-expression, drunk.

Like Hamlet - "Yea, from the table of my memory, I'll wipe away ..." - many just can't leave the mind. I regret being in love for 40 years with the same man, who said: "Yes, I do have feelings for you, I hate you." I regret having those chairs covered in shocking pink.

I regret the uncouth profession of journalism, palling up to people for stories and being in so many permanently temporary arrangements that life is makeshift.

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I regret not making myself more anonymous in daily life (the confessional is trashy) and being too keen on violent rapture and the first throes of love.

I regret not knowing that sincerity could be suicidal and that writing for a reader doesn't win you friends. I regret that I look on personal publicity as self-immolating and I regret being unable to get through Moby-Dick, losing my mother's hand-sorted Cartier pearls, caring too much and too little about the material.

I regret not having a pension and thinking I would not live beyond 50. I regret finishing med school but not doing the internship because I wanted to live in Paris and be a writer.

I regret sending the wrong e-mail showing that I am an angry person with poor impulse control, I regret being vociferously left-wing and being an advocate of committing the seven deadly sins before you turn 30.

 Actually, I regret turning 30. I regret not answering a note slipped to me in a train carriage in Europe with one word: HELP. I regret not giving the man who found my purse the R500 in it.

I regret the internet that has lanced the intellect with an itchy-trigger-fingered triage of information and introduced us to Kim Kardashian's fetishist bum.

It is such a pity that regret has become a Cinderella emotion. Even Brexiters are no longer allowed to linger on its leisurely shores before being told to "move on".

Ah, and I regret ever having worn a poncho.