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I’ve been a strong advocate that all my five children should be great swimmers, so you can deduce what my fear is.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 23 November 2024 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.
Others on this question
View all 256 →I’m afraid of the dark.
To be so cold that I am not able to sleep.
Danielle Steel
Novelist
Losing another child. (I lost one of my sons to suicide when he was 19.)
Scott Mills
English radio DJ and television presenter
Heights. For Children in Need, I had to abseil off the Orbit in the Olympic Park. It was the most terrifying thing I’ve done.
More from Bryn Terfel
View profile →Absolutely nothing.
I loved my 1 minute 40 seconds singing at the coronation of King Charles. I was the most nervous I’ve been.
That moment in Bilbao in 2020, when I tried to cross the street and did a pirouette and suffered a dreadful break in my right leg, which means now I have 10 screws and a band in it.
One horrible afternoon in Chicago when I forgot my words in The Marriage of Figaro, in a role I’d sung hundreds of times.
In 2006, I went fishing for red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico. On the way back, one of the engines caught fire and then we had one engine for 70 miles. Slowly but surely, we got to Baton Rouge in the darkness but then got very close to a very large passing ship – they didn’t see us and we didn’t see them.
I cleaned the toilets at the local pub every Saturday morning.
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