I WISH I hadn’t lost my temper with my teenage daughter last weekend.

Sadly this regret, which I always feel whenever I blow my top, is repeated many times throughout the year as I find it impossible to turn a blind eye when faced with a bolshy 16-year-old.

I know when she’s left home I’ll feel these regrets more sharply and worry about her having terrible memories of a psycho mother screeching outside her bedroom door.

I’m forever dwelling on what I regret, and I’m not alone. Research reveals that the average Brit spends more than two hours a week thinking about decisions they wish they hadn’t made and has up to six main regrets from their lives.

Wasting years of your life with the wrong partner – I’m sure my husband would agree with that one (psycho mum doubles up as psycho wife), not working hard at school and not seeing more of the world were among the main regrets voiced in a survey by the British Heart Foundation.

I don’t regret fooling around at school – the best days of your life shouldn’t all be about toil – and I did the best I could while larking about (who wants to be labelled a swot?), but I wish I’d thought more about what I was going to do afterwards.

A degree in geography isn’t much use in the real world and, given my time again, I’d have opted for law. This might have led to a decent income and a house that isn’t a wreck, although we have at last replaced the kitchen tap that seized up every time you ran hot water. It only took us eight years.

If I’d been a high-flying lawyer I’d almost certainly have had three fully functioning hot taps in the kitchen – two on the highly polished granite work tops, and one on the Tuscan marble kitchen island. And those worktops would be squeaky clean when I got in from the office thanks to the three housemaids. I wouldn’t be coming home to half-eaten bowls of pasta and cereal, empty yoghurt pots and more dirty laundry than Trusthouse Forte.

I’d like to have lived abroad and mastered a foreign language, and I regret not taking the opportunity to travel, and selling our first home which is worth a fortune now.

A quarter of people blame loved ones for holding them back from achieving their ambitions. I can’t say that of my husband, who is always hugely supportive when I make all the wrong decisions that I live to regret.