Never Go Back (Cecilia Peartree)
My mother had lots of favourite sayings. She inherited some from my grandmother, acquired some along the way and appropriated one from my father, whose motto was 'Never apologise'. As I've got older I can see the point of that last one. If you get to the stage of having to apologise, it's really too late for that to help. I tried to convince my sons of that when they were much younger, but I doubt if it sunk in then. Because my grandmother mostly spoke in Scots, one of her sayings was 'A bonny face sets a dish-clout'*, something of which I have yet to be convinced although my mother used to drag it out whenever I complained about having nothing to wear. One of my mother's sayings was 'Never go back'. I suppose I can see the point of that too, as I get older. Unfortunately she tended not to want to look back either, and was completely baffled when I decided to study history at university. She was also oddly resistant to any of us looking into the f...