"But you wouldn't change anything..."

It was a question delivered as a statement - and one which defied me to answer it.

Mar 28, 2025

apples in balance - no hidden fixings, honest!

We had been watching TV and I had poked fun of an advert for a beauty product which said it contained ‘anti-damage serum’. "I could do with some of that” had been my joke. Then my teenage daughter’s almost-question:

But you wouldn’t change anything…

Ah, the naivety of youth!

“Would you change anything?” — I wonder if that’s the hardest question in the world to answer.

The obvious response — especially if you are a person with a family — is most likely to be “of course not!”; but is that really true, or is it a cop-out? Even on the smallest scale there are surely things you would wish you had done differently: not had that extra glass of wine last Thursday; booked the 4-star hotel rather than the 3-star last summer; filled up with petrol before you ran out of gas on the motorway; painted the bathroom pale yellow rather than that hideous purple… You get the picture.

But this is all minutiae, isn’t it? Well, only if you ignore the fact that everything afterwards — everything — would be changed as a result. Perhaps if you’d abstained on the wine you would not have made that unfortunate comment; or with a full tank of petrol not had to call out the AA on the M4 and subsequently not been two hours late for that important meeting which meant you didn’t get the contract… etcetera etcetera.

But what about the big ticket items? What about that time when you were in your early twenties and you broke up with someone you’ve always wished you hadn’t? Or when you turned down that job because it felt too daunting? Or when you chose the wrong course at university? Or gave up on the opportunity to emigrate to Australia because you were just plain scared? Those are the meaty pivot points which can be infested with regret — and the kind of regret that last a lifetime.

Let’s say you had held that girl’s hand, or asked her to dance, or been bold enough to speak to her in the café — what then? Well, a different life for a start. Completely. And one which, from the viewpoint of ten, twenty, or forty years on, naggingly demands you try and examine how that life might have turned out.

But how can you? Indeed, not only do you not know, you can’t predict where you’d be right now if you and the girl had got together — or even whether you would have stayed together. Indeed, at the most fundamental level, you can’t possibly know if you’d still be alive today.

One of the blessings of being a writer is that we’re gifted with the ability to reimagine and depict those un-lived lives. We can create characters who are vaguely like us and that girl we didn’t kiss, and then explore — vicariously, of course — what might of happened.

Risk free? Well largely, but not entirely.

Writing allows us to have our cake and eat it, both to answer that original question in the way it is expected of us, and also in the way we might instinctively want to answer it. As writers we live the life we have now and we get the chance to play with our proxy life as it could have been.

“I believe we have two lives: the life we learn with, and the life we live with after that.” Glenn Close’s character, Iris, in the Bob Redford film, The Natural

For me, our relationship with our histories is a hugely complex matter. In one of the versions of my public bio I say this:

Perhaps first and foremost I consider myself a writer of fiction. I’m fascinated by how people relate to their histories, the decisions they take, the relationships they have. Our past informs our present and steers our future — whether we like it or not.

Virtually all my long-form fiction explores how characters assess, judge, and juggle with their pasts; how they resolve the things they feel need resolving; what they do as a result.

I find it fascinating and blissfully rewarding. Maybe that says too much about me, I don’t know…