It was exciting for a
morning, and then
it was back to grey
Life of George
Falling to bits
Quintin Jardine
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It’s too late
for regrets. Yet,
regrets I have a few
R D Kernohan
We often regret words and silences which neither command nor deserve
an apology; but something is lost all the same, even if it’s only an opportunity that probably won’t come again.
I recognised from the start the insignia of some kind of adherence on the other side of Glasgow’s ‘Great Divide’. Then I discovered something implied by his lapel badge that may have helped consolidate the defensiveness, sensitivity, sometimes over-sensitivity, of even a large and powerful minority. (I can sometimes feel the same defensiveness now that all Christians are often treated as a wayward minority in a secular society.) For, judging from my dealings with many others of the papal persuasion in politics and the media, he must have felt in a minority of a minority. His badge proclaimed him a teetotaller, in the honourable tradition of the great Irish temperance reformer Father Mathew.
I wish now I had tried to break the icy formality of our contacts by speaking of the way I had first discovered the power of that movement in Victorian Ireland by reading of it in Thackeray’s Irish travels, a neglected classic of its kind. I could also have drawn a parallel with another totally abstinent Irish tradition to which my Ulster Rechabite grandfather belonged. I could have tried on the badge-holder my argument that I was still temperate, though appreciably lapsed from abstinence. I let the chance go, even though that badge (which I have been unable to trace on the internet) was surely not just a silent statement but an invitation to discussion.
But our regrets should not only be about chances missed in making new contacts but about the loss of old ones. Usually such regret stems from neglect or from losing addresses and telephone numbers before the internet gave us more opportunity to trace those whom we had known long since and lost awhile. (And even with the internet we can leave it too late: I recently tried to trace a journalist, an old friend in a far country, and discovered that he had long since committed suicide.) However the most acute regrets can be about words or actions that demand no apologies but which still break off all connection.
In my National Service days I had, as the Germans sing in Uhland’s funereal ballad, ‘a good comrade’. Our comradeship even extended to being recalled together from leave we had started a little prematurely and saluting smartly on receipt from a Colditz veteran of his ‘award’ of 14 consecutive days each as orderly officer. My comrade lingered a little in the service and I was demobbed before I could complete the sentence, but we met intermittently afterwards, even though he lived abroad. One day he telephoned to ask for a loan to arrange a return to Britain. It was only for £750 or so but he wanted an answer there and then. I paused and gave one, and have neither seen nor heard tell of him since. I regret now that I didn’t risk the money and keep the contact.
We often regret words and silences which neither command nor deserve an apology; but something is lost all the same, even if it’s only an opportunity that probably won’t come again. I regret now that neither a career that led me to some troubled or disputed parts of the earth, nor some extravagant leisurely travels later, ever took me to Australia or New Zealand; and, to be honest, I regret that more than the Gaelic and the Greek.
I was once booked for a small-ship exploration cruise that was to take in the main ports of both countries but before we sailed the sponsors drastically changed the itinerary to favour uninhabited islands and nature reserves rather than cities of culture and cricket or with famous Rugby stadia. Rather petulantly I sought and got my money back, meaning to fix up something else soon. But one lesson of life is how soon not only the first opportunities but all the subsequent ones seem to pass. It’s probably too late now. But I wish I had seen the union flag surviving on the corner of the star-spangled blue banners of young countries and not just waiting to come down in Central Africa or making a last defiant stand as a ‘club flag’ in Natal. I even regret in a milder way that I was in my 40s before I ever saw Canada, still with far more pride in Scottish and other British traditions than we’re sometimes led to expect.
From such regrets poets derive metaphors about gathering rosebuds while you may; and Shakespeare has something about taking a tide in the affairs of men. Maybe they are also thoughts and moods that should occur to the politicians, media people, and celebrities who now offer so many facile apologies but perhaps never have time for real regrets.
But regrets are not always about opportunities lost forever. Some concern matters where good things can be better late than never. I might even look for a website that teaches Gaelic.
R D Kernohan is a writer and broadcaster
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