LEAVING aside her failure to go to SpecSavers, Edith Piaf famously had nothing to regret. But it seems that by the time we reach our 60s, many of us have painful memories of the things we should, or should not, have done.

A new study has claimed that no fewer than one in three people over 60 regrets letting a perfect partner slip through their fingers.

Many over-60s also regret not dating more people before they got married, not travelling more, and not having married the right person.

A whopping 66 per cent of those questioned for the survey even claimed the Swinging Sixties had passed them by.

For many, rebellion and counter-culture meant little more than growing their hair long and/or reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

The memory, though, is not the most exact of tools, especially for those of a hippyish persuasion. Don’t they say that if you remember the Swinging Sixties, you weren’t there?

Cheer up, groovers – you probably had the time of your lives.

Then again, though, you might not have done. I’m certainly not sure my mum and dad did much festival-going or barefoot dancing. I was around, for one thing, and so were my little sister and brother.

My dad did have some regrettable flares, but I think that was about as far as it went.

Unfortunately, rueful reminiscence is not just for the over-60s. I’m as bad as the average baby-boomer when it comes to brooding on the mistakes that I’ve made. Regrets, I’ve had a few, and certainly a few more than Edith.

Still, if you think hard enough about your fondest regrets, you probably have to accept you’d probably have had them whatever decision you made. Saying no to this, saying yes to that – you made your choice, it’s best to live with it.

And those who think they missed out might like to consider that the perfect partner, like the grass, is probably always greener on the other side.

However, if all the chagrin gets too much, there is a way out, because scientists have found that you can wipe out painful memories with a simple blood-pressure drug.

Apparently they got a lot of human volunteers to look at nasty spider pictures while giving them all an electric shock.

The next day the eight-legged horrors (that’s the spiders, not the scientists) made another appearance.

But before the tests resumed, the volunteers had been given some beta-blockers. Hey presto, they failed to recoil or brace themselves for an unpleasant experience.

So far, so pain-free.

Humans, the reasoning goes, can now get rid of a lot of negative baggage, from social embarrassment to post-traumatic stress disorder, and get on with having a happy life.

But you can always rely on some killjoy to burst your bubble, and it seems some thinkers are worried that without painful memories we might lose the ability to learn from our mistakes.

I’m not too sure that being aware of where you’ve gone wrong is a sure-fire way to protect yourself against the error of your ways.

There’s a particularly heart-breaking young man who loomed large in my early life. I knew full well he would never be good for me, but I had to keep checking, just to make absolutely sure.

And after all, if it doesn’t traumatise you for life, what’s wrong with making the same mistake a couple of times? I had a lot of fun with Mr Wrong, and I certainly haven’t forgotten that, either.