If you could edit your past, what would you change?

In particular, my decision to sell McDonald's was a very big mistake. Overall, you would have been better off last year if I had regularly snuck off to the movies during market hours.

I would never have smoked - I gave up years ago.

When I thought maybe I've just got a few weeks, I thought God this is what they mean by the reckoning. I've got to sort all this stuff out in days. Is it possible to sort out all those things in your past that you'd prefer not to have done? ... But actually by going through the process we've gone through, I think we have. And it's a real blessing to have this time do that.

The respelling of my name to Joseph.

Nothing. It’s too risky. What if you eliminated a misjudged situation from your life and it turned out that one of your children wasn’t born, or you failed to meet your partner?

So many times I’ve wondered what might have happened to me if I had lost my legs, or even just my right one, where my first melanoma appeared two or three years later. If I’d just been a second slower stepping away from the car, I might not be dying now. I’d be legless, of course, but still in good health. Of these fateful forks in the road are our lives made up. We are all just a millimetre away from death, all of the time, if only we knew it.

My sister’s death – I would love to meet her kids. [Karen Grammer was 18 when she was abducted, raped and murdered.]

I would do a lot more investments.

I would have articulated aloud the comments I too often suppressed out of deference to arrogant, condescending, sexist bores.

I would never have gone on a diet. I would go back with the knowledge that not being perfect is fine.

I wouldn’t bother learning how to use logarithms, and I might give netball a miss.

I practise stoicism. Not the stiff-upper-lip, modern stuff, but the ancient Greek philosophy. You have to accept what you can’t change. I try to face forwards all the time. When that doesn’t work, I think about buying a machine gun.

I would have honoured my body, I would have lived inside it, cherished it and protected it.

I would have been a better listener. I would have pursued more friendships instead of focusing so much on work and myself. I’m doing all that now, but I’m running out of time.

I wouldn’t care so much what people thought.

I made too much money in my 30s, and it distorted my writing and made me less hungry. Then, in my 40s, I spent all the money on daily life – and now I don’t have it.

I’d give myself some fashion sense.

I don’t think I’d change anything: the bad forms you more than the good.

When I was 17, I was offered a tennis scholarship at the University of Virginia. I wish I had been brave enough to take it.

When I was working hard, I was going so fast that I didn’t absorb a lot.