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I would have behaved better to my first wife, and the girl I lived with afterwards. I was always away.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 3 December 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.
Others on this question
View all 203 →I would have been OK with feeling shy. In my teenage years, I thought being an actor meant that you had to be a little more performative.
Noah Harari
Israeli historian and philosopher
I would like to come out at 16 or 17, and not 21.
I’d drink less alcohol in the 90s.
I would find a much better way of looking after my mum in her last three years of dementia. I did my best, but it was incredibly difficult to find the right kind of care unless you’ve got £3,000 a week to spend.
More from John Simpson
View profile →Recently, when I got out of hospital and into my own bed with my wife and 10-year-old son; we watched some crap television and life had never seemed better.
Reading the news. It’s a dull job.
The problem with my job is that you meet people you admire and then you don’t admire them so much. The only one I carried on admiring was Nelson Mandela.
I’d like to say sorry to my mother. I had to choose between my parents, and I chose my father because he didn’t have any other kids. (My mother was a war widow and had two children from her first marriage.) I thought, in a childish way, that one had to be fair. It was very difficult for my mother and me, and we never really got over it.
Comfort, warmth and security.
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