I would have taken more drugs.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 7 May 2016 source ↗
The question
If you could revise one chapter of your past, what would you change?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
Repeated verbatim in The Guardian's long-running Saturday Q&A; two publisher-hosted examples establish recurrence.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
I would have taken more drugs.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 7 May 2016 source ↗
My mum died in her early 70s, and for the last six or seven years of her life she couldn’t move, didn’t speak. By the time our children were born, she was too ill to communicate. I haven’t many regrets in life, but I do regret that they never got to know her, even though she was still alive for a few years. They couldn’t see her warmth, her spirit, her courage.
That moment in Bilbao in 2020, when I tried to cross the street and did a pirouette and suffered a dreadful break in my right leg, which means now I have 10 screws and a band in it.
I practise stoicism. Not the stiff-upper-lip, modern stuff, but the ancient Greek philosophy. You have to accept what you can’t change. I try to face forwards all the time. When that doesn’t work, I think about buying a machine gun.
Nothing. Without my past I wouldn’t be who I am today.
A selection of single paragraphs that perfectly capture something I’ve thought or felt, even if it’s shameful or perverse.
As not having been tiresome.
Getting exactly what I wanted.
He knows who he is. I’ve apologised. I wish it made more difference.
My own bad prose.
Jessica Hynes, Richard Coles, Armistead Maupin, Greg James, Ian Rankin, Tim Minchin
Search the directory for somebody in particular.