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.
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.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 4 March 2017 source ↗
Through food, I’ve become more interested in the protection of soil, the way things are grown, and biodiversity. I’d have become a quantum physicist!
I would have thought more about exercise and a healthy lifestyle in my 20s, 30s and 40s.
All the times I was mean to someone.
I should have sung with David Gilmour at Carnegie Hall because I'm a massive fan of Pink Floyd.
I would love to have a good memory. I’m at an age when remembering something right away is as good as an orgasm.
Dying just a millisecond before I was about to say something I really wanted the people I love to hear.
In my 30s, I was staring at a pair of expensive boots in a shop window when the photographer Gordon Parks came up behind me. He instantly understood, because he grew up even poorer than me; he made me buy them on my credit card.
Dr Denis Mukwege, because he is to sexualised violence against females what Mandela was to apartheid.
As someone who left the world around me a little kinder and less hierarchical.
I haven’t done it yet.
Jimmy Carter, Zack Polanski, Jeremy Vine, Bill Clinton, Keir Starmer, Sadiq Khan
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