Lauren Laverne
English radio DJ, and television presenter
It would have been lovely to have grown up in private like a lot of my friends.
If you could edit your past, what would you change?
Question
What did you want to be when you were growing up?
Identity & self
Question
What song would you like played at your funeral?
Death & what remains
Question
When were you happiest?
Time & hindsight
Question
How close have you come to death?
Death & what remains
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.
The 12 years I spent in receivership. That was me being a dick. I lost the court case when I wanted to sack my management and had to pay them £120,000. I said, “I am not paying you, because I should have won.”
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 5 August 2017 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 203 →
Samuel West
British actor, theatre director, and narrator
I’d have done everything earlier and with more style.
The loss of Conrad.
Gloria Steinem
Writer and feminist organiser
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.
More from Shaun Ryder
View profile →In 1975, I watched the film Stardust, and Adam Faith said, “I supply the birds, the pills and the pot.” And I thought, “I want that.”
One Nation Under a Groove, by Funkadelic.
When I was 15 and starting my first job as a messenger boy at the post office, delivering telegrams.
I had a gun shoved in my eyeball in New York by a crack dealer in the 1980s. I have also watched somebody next to me get shot in the head in a gun battle – that was in Jamaica in the early 1990s.
More on failure & regret
- What has been your biggest disappointment? 366 answers
- Who most deserves an apology from you, and why? 209 answers
- What is the worst thing anyone has said to you? 122 answers
- Which moment embarrassed you most? 122 answers
- How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a favourite failure? 69 answers
- What is the hardest thing that has happened to you, and what did you carry out of it? 36 answers
Also answered this
Beverley Knight, kd lang, Shaznay Lewis, Tim Minchin, Melanie Blatt, Rita Ora
Search the directory for somebody in particular.
Explore further
- All failure & regret questions
- The The Q&A questionnaire — 25 questions from the same format
- Explore the archive — by field, age, era, and subject