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Milf Teeth

It Is Important for Humans to Have Regrets

Otherwise we'd be just like Karl Lagerfeld, or Tony Blair.

Hello, I'm Sophie Heawood, does my column need a title? If John Doran is MENK then I could be MILF. Or maybe MILF TEETH. I don't want motherhood to define me.

Never trust an atom. They make up everything. And never trust someone who says they’ve got no regrets. I read about those people in magazine interviews. “What are your regrets?” the famous person is asked. “I regret nothing,” they reply, if they’re Karl Lagerfeld, or, “No regrets!” they say, if they’re more familiar with the sound of human laughter. “Everything I have done has led me to this place,” they add, by way of explanation that it all happened for a reason and so cannot be regretted. Yes, everything you’ve done has led you to this place, but where are you? In a mansion of your own tears? Devon? Everything Ian Brady did led him to a very long stay in a maximum-security psychiatric hospital. I’m just saying. Regret is what separates us from the celebrities, which is why you need to keep a firm grasp on it, and stay close to your own failings, and make sure you continue to wake up sweating in the night, your forehead suddenly clammy as you remember that one singularly awful thing you said to a room full of people seven years ago. A room full of people who were cool enough not to say anything to a room full of people. Comfortably cool. And then there was you. Stay with this fear. Stay with this horror about all the dreary things you have ever done, the life opportunities you have bungled, the chances of love you have thrown into the gutter, the kids you bullied at school who have probably been in therapy ever since, except you don’t know for sure, because nobody ever saw them again. You need to keep on feeling really bad about that. Do not ever try to emulate the unnatural confidence of someone like Tony Blair, a man who famously said he had no reverse gear. People, he could really have done with a reverse gear, one that went “REVERSING. REVERSING.” out loud. The man turned from an ambitious leftie to a psychopath led into war by the voice of God, which was cool when Joan of Arc did it, but she had a horse. My regrets live beside me like knives. They come to me in moments of weakness and caress my weakest zones in the night, making them weaker. I am going to tell you my biggest regret now. It doesn’t involve killing or raping anyone, which would definitely be worse. I haven’t done either of those. It isn’t the betrayal of people’s trust, which has probably happened. (Definitely happened.) It isn’t being cruel to people who loved me. It isn’t the fact that I dropped out of university not once, but twice. (The same department, in the same university – OK, I’m just going to apologise right now to the Portuguese department at King's College London. It was good of you to let me onto your BA when I didn’t know a word of Portuguese, and it was even nicer of you to let me onto your MA when I hadn’t even finished the BA that I hadn’t initially known a word of, having run away to Hong Kong to work as an extra in really bad Chinese soap operas for a year, and then come back to London and done a different degree at nightschool for years, and tried to work in advertising and cried all through my lunch hours, which is a big look for a receptionist, and then decided to do a part-time MA in Portuguese-African studies, having never been to Africa, an idea that lasted at least eight weeks until I realised how hard it was to hold down a job and also read a huge number of history books in a language I only partly understood. I also hadn’t even worked out how I was going to pay the fees, which is why I quit again before they noticed that I hadn’t. On an unrelated note, my parents called me Sophie because it means wisdom in Greek.) My biggest regret is none of these. My biggest regret is that – and typing this is genuinely making me feel a bit sick because my parents are staying with me at the moment as it’s my birthday tomorrow, so everyone has to be nice to me for the day as if I am 12, but they’re going to read this and everyone is going to hate me, OH GOD. Fuck it. Once, in my late teens, I went to stay the night in a small seaside town with a boy who was a couple of years older than me. He was great. We paid to stay in the sweetest little Bed and Breakfast, run by a very local family, who told us how to get to a nice local pub for a drink. So we had quite a few of these drinks. Then we went back to the house, properly pissed. Where we found they had a guest book, in which their lovely friendly guests had written lovely things about this lovely family and their lovely little guest house by the sea. All these notes from years of visitors, saying how kind the hosts had been to them, how snug the bedrooms were, how warm the toast was. One couple, though, had gone the extra mile. They had drawn a picture of themselves having a lovely time at the B&B. This illustration had obviously taken ages, as the wife had depicted them all neatly kitted out in their hiking gear. Bumptious, beaming, backpacks. So sweetly drawn, and so recent, as the page after it was still blank, but bound to take pride of place for years to come. Which is why to this day I still don’t understand why I wrote on the back of it, in huge capital letters, “SOPHIE AND **** CAME TO STAY AND FUCKING HELL WE ARE SO PISSED SHITTING BOLLOCKS CUNT FUCK FUCK FUCK.” I’m not sure what I wrote afterwards but that sentence had already taken up most of the blank page -  the back of the page with the drawing on it.

(Now I come to write the rant down, for the first time in my life, it suddenly becomes clear where the narrative style for this column first took root.)

So. This is why you need regret. If I didn’t still regret that act, I might have become a comfortable person, who would just sit down and watch telly every night and be content with the status quo. As it is, I spend at least some point of each day racked with guilt and shame and self-loathing, and that drives me onwards to try to work harder and redeem myself somehow. Or so I told myself when I thought up the subject matter for this column. I’m starting to regret it now, though. The simple fact is that I don’t know why I ruined their guest book and I have never been able to live with the guilt. There is no punchline to this column. Goodbye.

Follow Sophie on Twitter: @heawood

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