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.
Nothing at all.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 22 August 2026 source ↗
I would have come out earlier.
I would have spent more time practising and got a proper lawyer to sort out my first album contract.
Several haircuts and my belly-button piercing.
I wish I could go back and not be the anxious child that I was. I spent the first 25 years of my life just trying to survive human interaction.
I was about six years old in a market square in Italy and my dad said, “Oh, those shorts would look perfect on you.” So he whipped my trousers off and I hadn’t got any knickers on.
As a perfectly decent bloke.
That’s the 64-million-dollar question.
The king – because he’s been through quite a bit and I think he’s come out the other side brilliantly.
My first wife, because I left her.
Not playing James Bond.
Adam Clayton, Sofie Gråbøl, Alison Steadman, Burt Reynolds, Rachel Whiteread, Adam Kay
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