Me? I did it everybody else's way

Apparently, the most requested song over the 70 years of Desert Island Discs has been the Edith Piaf hit, Je Ne Regrette Rien (I have no regrets), writes Peter Rhodes.

How odd. Real life is all about making mistakes, regretting them and learning from them.

When someone declares "I have no regrets," it is another way of saying "I have learned absolutely nothing" or even "I have nothing to learn."

But then people tend not to be the best judges of their own existence.

So many men are whacked as toddlers, bullied at school, harassed through 40 years in some dogsbody job and treated in retirement by their wife as a cross between a pack-mule and a village idiot.

Finally, they pass from the sight of men, as the coffin slides away in the crematorium, to the strains of Frank Sinatra singing I Did It My Way.