Regrets? Ah go, I'll have a few

I had the pleasure of experiencing a garden centre with my parents this weekend. Yes you read that right. A garden centre. On a Saturday. Nearing Christmas. With my parents. Any one of these sentences on its own has been known to induce panic in many a normally sane and sentient human and, as these things go, it was a venture that had come about in a perfect storm of necessity and timing. Whether that was good or bad timing was really up to my patience on the day. But nevertheless, I hadn't seen them properly in a while and I needed a poinsettia. And so I found myself amidst the poinsettias and Christmas fruit cakes listening to my parental units froth at the mouth over the rising price of buds and seeds wondering if I had indeed entered an outdoor version of hell. It didn't help that I seemed to be continually surrounded by groups of clucking women all googly eyed at the gifts and gadgets that now litter normally useful garden centres. Kitchens are now covered with these little kitsch pictures and ornaments found in garden centres. They are all fake distressed wood, straw ropes and etched with 'contemplative' quotes; 'A messy kitchen means a happy cook’; 'Life is a journey'; 'Dance like no-one's watching', to name a few of the banal platitudes. I have no idea why these cloying snippets of 'wisdom' are sold in garden centres, other than the suspicion that they must sell well in there as garden centres create a specific type of nesting feeling in women (see clucking women above) and a king and castle characteristic in men. Or maybe it's the compost fumes. But in between chairing peace talks with my mother and a wide eyed member of staff who really didn't know the correct way to water an orchid and fielding questions from my father about my savings plans, I actually found a quote that struck a chord (again it might have been the compost fumes). ‘Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.’ According to a recent survey we spend more than two hours a week dwelling on our regrets – around 19 minutes a day. From thinking we’ve picked the wrong career/partner/choice of lunch, over a quarter of 2,000 people surveyed believed it was impossible to live a life without regrets. As I witnessed a scrum for cut price Yankee Candles on Saturday I didn’t half know what they meant. In the top ten list of regrets was not spending enough time with our parents and as I stood there in a garden centre, on a Saturday, nearing Christmas, cursing these scrums, queues and feeling a little bit like Bridget Jones but without Hugh or Colin and yet seeing more of my parents than I had in weeks, I decided to buy this cheesy little sign with that quote on regrets. I knew exactly what it was talking about.