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.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 12 October 2024 source ↗
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.
After Emmerdale, babysitting. I freaked out – I couldn’t believe people put me in charge of their children.
Selling stolen mangoes to pay for a cinema ticket, aged eight.
When I was 17 I took on a class of six-year-olds for a week. When the Angelus rang at noon, they stood up in silence and I realised I was supposed to recite the prayer, which I did not know. I said: “There will be no Angelus today because of that child fidgeting at the back.”
Arrogance and narcissism.
We become fertiliser.
I’ve had motorcycle accidents – I had one where I ended up in intensive care. But if you are on a frontline – which I have been – and people start shooting at you – which they have done – you put yourself in quite considerable danger. So: on a moving frontline in northern Afghanistan in 2001.
Funny, impatient, annoying.
Failure, being caught out, making an idiot of myself.
Spirit of adventure and kindness.
Gloria Steinem, Malcolm Gladwell, John Simpson, Krishnan Guru-Murthy, Barack Obama, Robert Peston
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