I suppose this song appeals for different reasons now than when I first heard it. I often feel I lived my life backwards. I went off to the high life after time in the mundane world. I experienced a certain amount of “subtle whoring”, did lose some freedom for a while and had to live those “million lies”, though not through my doing and maybe not quite so many. I love the line that “I lived the sweet life but never knew I’d be bitter from the sweet”. I don’t think I was but maybe, doing it my way round, having been to me first, I missed that.

If I reflect on my last relationship I can see bits of it in this song. When my last partner joined me to work on a project, she insisted that we tell no-one what I had done before and we should make sure people knew it was a joint venture. This was the start of the lies she needed to tell about our time together.

Sadly for these little untruths to be true, we only began to work on this idea together in 2002 and yet there is a vast array of evidence, both paper-based and on the internet, to clearly show that I had been doing something well before I met her. If you ever meet her or read anything from her, it would be worth checking whether there is any truth in what she says.

Again this song actually fits in with most of what I have been saying above. It is being sung by a woman, who has lived the high life, to another woman, whose life has been more mundane. Now the singer is growing older she seems to regret missing out on the simpler way of life. She needs to tell someone about it.

“Sometimes I’ve been to crying for unborn children that might have made me complete” also amuses me. That last partner spent years decrying those who gave up their lives for the joy of having children and yet, now, seems to think being a mother a fantastic experience, even if it sometimes appears that no-one has ever had a child before.

Should we regret things in our lives? We can't change them once they have happened so regret seems a pointless exercise. Far better to learn from them, took me a few times to do that, and try to minimise any hurt or pain caused by what you believed was the correct decision at the time.