Caddying for really rich people at this country club in Connecticut when I was a teenager. They would talk like I wasn’t there so I would hear all about their lives, their affairs and their stupidity, and yet I couldn’t say anything.
What is the worst job you have done?
Question
Which trait do you most dislike in yourself?
Identity & self
Question
How would you describe yourself in three words?
Identity & self
Question
What did you want to be when you were growing up?
Identity & self
Question
What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
Time & hindsight
Question
What scares you about getting older?
Time & hindsight
Question
What most recently made you cry?
Identity & self
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
The Guardian's long-running Q&A repeatedly asks this standing question, with minor tense variation.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
About five years ago, I was in a play that was an unmitigated disaster. I had to rally the troops and go out every night.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 28 October 2023 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 229 →
Helen George
English actress
Waitressing. I was so bad. I smashed things. I once mistakenly ordered a very expensive bottle of wine for a table. They thought they were ordering a very average bottle of wine, and I ordered them an £800 bottle and they drank it. I got the sack a few weeks later.
Mucking out pigs on a farm when I was 15.
du Beke
English dancer and TV presenter
I was a door-to-door carpet-cleaning salesman. I thought my life was going to end, so I binned that after a day.
More from Dervla Kirwan
View profile →Procrastination.
Warm, intelligent, accommodating.
A forensic scientist.
To know thyself, as Shakespeare said.
Pain and loneliness.
At my mother’s funeral last year.
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