The question
What disappointment has stayed with you longest?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
This exact question recurs in The Guardian's institutional Q&A pool.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
That I still don’t understand life. When I was young, I thought at some point I would find somebody who does. I am 45, and there is a good chance that I’ll never meet somebody like that.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 23 October 2021 source ↗
I’ve never been upgraded on a plane.
How big music companies have treated their artists in the digital age.
I spent my life searching for family. I travelled around the world to look each one of them in the eye. Unfortunately, but understandably, for most of them, I am their biggest disappointment.
Not going to the World Cup in 1986 and not going to the World Cup in 1998.
I was almost run over by a bus when I was 13. And in 1991, in the Gulf war, an Iraqi missile hit close to my house.
When I was 16, at the beginning of the summer vacation, I worked in a factory that made industrial valves and I was a much worse industrial valve producer than historian.
I would like to come out at 16 or 17, and not 21.
When my dog died a couple of years ago. We were in Greece on vacation and a friend was watching her at home, and she was bitten by a snake. We rushed home, but we were too late by a few hours.
On a personal level, the friend who is a single mum raising two kids by herself during this Covid era. She is a real hero. If a historical personality, I choose Mikhail Gorbachev, who probably saved the world from world war three.
Now. I’ve learned to adjust my expectations to reality better than when I was 20 or 10.
Shirley Ballas, Steph McGovern, Bianca Jagger, Andy Murray, David Hasselhoff, Sheena Easton
Search the directory for somebody in particular.