DO
I had my heart broken a lot in my teens, but I'm not sure I'd change it.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 6 September 2014 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.
Others on this question
View all 203 →
Jessica Hynes
British actress and writer
I wouldn’t have drunk alcohol.
Jeremy Vine
English presenter and journalist
I’d stop my teenage self worrying about how my life was going to pan out.
Rose McGowan
American actress and activist
I wouldn’t have taken that meeting [with Weinstein in 1997].
Henry Marsh
Neurosurgeon and writer
I should have known that I might not like what my brain scan showed, just as I should have known that the symptoms of prostatism that were increasingly bothering me were just as likely to be caused by cancer as by the benign prostatic enlargement that happens in most men as they age. But I continued to think that illness happened to patients and not to doctors, even though I was now retired. Twenty months after I had my brain scanned, I was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. I had had typical symptoms for years, steadily getting worse, but it took me a long time before I could bring myself to ask for help. I thought I was being stoical when in reality I was being a coward. I simply couldn’t believe the diagnosis at first, so deeply ingrained was my denial.
Recorded
Edited extract from And Finally: Matters of Life and Death, published by Vintage, The Guardian, 13 August 2022
source ↗
More from Dermot O'Leary
View profile →My parents for the roots; my old parish priest, Father Arthur Barrow, for the fire and the reason; Richard Curtis for the drive and humanity; and, for living in the public eye with principles, George Clooney.
On Curracloe beach with my family in Wexford, circa 1980, after a swim.
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