Heights, something happening to my children and Manchester United getting good again (I’m a Man City fan).
The Q&A, The Guardian, 23 August 2025 source ↗
The question
What do you fear most?Originally asked
Vanity Fair, to its interview subject, The Proust Questionnaire
The exact prompt is fixed in Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire and independently sustained in The Guardian's The Q&A over multiple decades.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Heights, something happening to my children and Manchester United getting good again (I’m a Man City fan).
The Q&A, The Guardian, 23 August 2025 source ↗
Naming my greatest fear, because then I’ll have to admit it, won’t I?
Being on a plane that is about to crash.
Insanity. I am on a recovery programme – clean from drugs and drink for many years – and if I stopped doing all that stuff I’d go crazy pretty quick and pick up drugs again, because I was a real fucking addict.
Many readers have informed me that it is a tragic and dreary business to go into death without faith. I don’t feel that way. “Faith” is neutral. All depends on what is believed in. I have no desire to live forever. The concept frightens me. I am 69, have had cancer, will die sooner than most of those reading this. That is in the nature of things.
A sense of what’s right, a few quid and some nice paintings.
This was said about me in a Radio 1 focus group: “I don’t pay my licence fee to hear scummy northerners.”
When I changed the toner cartridge in my printer all on my own – that was a day of pure euphoria.
Working in a bottle factory, which lasted one day, and the Radio 1 breakfast show.
A nice long rest.
The Radio 1 breakfast show was an embarrassing moment that lasted for nine months.
Tim Peake, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, Charles Dance, Roger Ebert, Rose Tremain, Charles Osgood
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