JS
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 →
Jo Brand
English entertainer
I’d have told a racist cabbie to go fuck himself, but I was scared about being chucked out on the street at 2am.
Harry Redknapp
English football player and manager
I was probably too cheeky to chairmen over the years.
Bill Bryson
American-British author
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?
Ethan Hawke
Actor, director and novelist
Too many things to mention.
More from John Simpson
View profile →Comfort, warmth and security.
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.
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.
Reading the news. It’s a dull job.
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.
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