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’d have stuck with the original Dexys Midnight Runners look we started in 1978, which became known as the New Romantic look a couple of years later. Our management and record label talked us out of it. Later, Duran Duran and Spandau came out with that look and that made us look old-fashioned.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 9 August 2025 source ↗
I’d have been less precocious as a child (you grow up fast in New York). I’d have prolonged the naivety.
I would have tried that anti-stretch mark cream during pregnancy.
Since hostile people still call me a former Playboy Bunny, even at 82, I probably shouldn’t have done that in my youth, even to write an exposé. And since a couple of times they’ve also referred to me as a former CIA agent, because I went to two Soviet-era communist youth festivals, I probably shouldn’t have done that, either. Yet if I hadn’t done both, I might have judged other people by such empty symbols, too.
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.
On stage – the Old Vic in 1981 and Glastonbury last year.
My dad said, “You’re going nowhere.” I was seven or eight.
My brother Pete passing on in 2005.
I worked in the stores of Edgware hospital when I was about 17, and it was grey and depressing.
The contentment I have now.
Gerry Adams, because he’s got incredible integrity and vision, and he’s had to put up with so much flak.
Kim Gordon, James Bay, Richard Coles, Florence Welch, Cerys Matthews, Yusuf Islam
Search the directory for somebody in particular.