Hindsight

There often, with the benefit of hindsight, seems an inevitability about what happens to people. One believes the clues were there all along, compressed into conversations, encrypted into encounters, like a word whose meaning one was then yet to learn. But one wonders a bit about hindsight. Is it really all it’s trumped up to be? Would I now with hindsight not have stolen money from my mother’s purse when I was ten? I doubt it, even though I was eventually caught and the crime caused some domestic distress. The amphetamine rush of creping into the bedroom while my parents watched television directly below and spying the bag on the bed was a reward in itself. That to me was life on a scale worth living. And the possibility of outrage and punishment was part of the pact. Hindsight hasn’t done the planet much good either. I suppose because, like apologies, it always arrives too late. Sometimes I think history is a bit like Cluedo. This time round it was Professor Plum with the lead piping in the conservatory. So what? Next time it might be Miss Scarlet with the dagger in the ballroom but the plot is always the same.