Date: 05.03.09
Journey: London Bridge to West Hampstead
Reader: Elderly lady with vivid purple lipstick and a woolly coat
Title: The Gift Of Years – Regret
It’s been a while since I’ve done an Underground Book Review but what better way to come back into the fold than with a self-help book masked as a novel. I don’t often make the assumption of people’s book choices by their casual appearance but something jarred with the image I was presented with. The lady in question was what one could only politely put as being ‘comfortably eccentric’. She was wearing a bold and jazzy woolly coat on a blisteringly hot day, had hair to rival Vivienne Westwood and seemed to constantly pout as if her life depended on it. What struck me as odd was on the surface she seemed to not need this book that so clearly coached you through regret; she looked as if regret was far from her and she lived life to the full. Lived it to the maximum in her warm woolly coat and lashings of purple lipstick. But evidently not. I suppose she could have shipped her first and only child off to be fostered and had never really recovered. I was ignoring the fact that she could be harbouring sinister thoughts towards an ex Italian lover from days gone by. A mother she’d never quite connected with… A photographer whose name she didn’t catch after liaising behind closed doors… The next door neighbour she didn’t quite own up to stealing his pornography DVDs… It goes to show that we all feel regret but not all of us will buy a book to put on display to all other humans that highlights the fact.
What snatches I did manage to read were direct and over-wrought with solemn ‘life’ questions. It was therapy written down on the page in such a way that you couldn’t read it without forming a triangle with your hands and nodding every so often. “Ask yourself why you feel regret, how does it make you feel?” Yup. One of those books. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure these books bring great relief to many who choose to spend many pennies on them… But c’mon, these are questions we all ask each other everyday down the pub, around the dinner table and most importantly in our own heads. Some people digest things better when they’re written down by an author and there’s been an exchange of money, that I can accept.
“We need to imagine that we’re on the edge of a cliff and happiness is one way and loneliness is the other. Will yourself to walk the right direction and you’ll be at one with inner peace. Regret is an ugly festering mass within oneself and to dissect it we need to have our own space.”
Want me to carry on? Nope, didn’t think so. The last quote maybe slightly embellished but it all means the same thing. Then again there might have been an amazing plot twist coming up and if that’s the case I’ll go out and order one for all of you… A must read!
No, thought not.
