Ian Rankin wishes he’d been there more for his kids? OK, but others wish they’d been there less | Emma Beddington

Rich or poor, male or female, it’s always a struggle to balance work and family. We’re all wondering about the paths we didn’t take

‘I do feel I’ve wasted my life, really, living in a world of fictional characters,” said Ian Rankin – multi-award-winning author (more than 35m copies of his Rebus novels sold), knighthood for services to literature and charity, a man who achieves more in one year than I have in 51 – on a recent podcast. If you’ve wasted your life, Sir Ian, what about the rest of us?

There was levity in Rankin’s delivery, but real feeling, too – an ambivalence about what his creative drive had cost him. “There’s big moments, big beats in my life that I just don’t have any memory of: holidays taken, first days at school for my kids and that sort of stuff, because in my head I was somewhere else,” he continued.