I wouldn’t change anything. When I was 29, my first husband died, so I learned a new way of thinking about life, which is: there are many things that you can’t control.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 23 September 2023 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 wouldn’t change anything. When I was 29, my first husband died, so I learned a new way of thinking about life, which is: there are many things that you can’t control.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 23 September 2023 source ↗
I don’t think I would change anything because it might not have got me here.
Trusting some men.
I’d have been there on the spot for every major news story I’ve talked about in the studio, at the time it happened.
My surname. You have no idea how many versions I’ve read and heard. It was especially irritating during my Abba years. You can imagine someone calling our hotel and saying: “I’d like to speak to one of the guys in Abba.” Who do you think the receptionist called, Andersson or Ulvaeus?
When my first husband died, because it felt like my life was over, and it was challenging to keep in life at the time.
My mum looks after our kids all the time, but on the very few weeks she takes time off, doing it all is a big juggle. My mum is a combination of Mary Poppins and Angela Davis, so I’d clone her.
I worked in a cafe, which I loved, but when it was quiet we had to scrape the fat out from between the tiles on the floor with a butter knife.
I remember being a teenager and writing this romantic short story in the style of the Brontës on a computer and I didn’t realise that the person whose computer it was could just print it out. A group of boys had a couple of pages and they were all reading it.
My mum, for the way that she brought up her three children and managed to make her money work. She worked as a cleaner for all these families we went to church with. She would cycle there with my little sister on the back of her bike – we didn’t have a car. She had an amazing mind for planning and organising so that we got to do ballet, we went to Brownies.
Listening to a song that my brother-in-law – the brother of Jason, my first husband – wrote, about how hard it was to live without his brother.
Jack Whitehall, George Michael, Joan Jett, Rory Stewart, Ian McEwan, David Jason
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