The question
How close have you come to dying?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
A recurring Guardian Q&A prompt asked directly across respondents and years.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
I’ve dodged a couple of bullets in dodgy war zones, but I suspect the closest I’ve come to death was a reckless, drunken brush with a waltzer at a student funfair. It nearly chopped me in half.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 2 January 2021 source ↗
Climbing in Tibet, surfing in Australia and a moment ago by a courgette cutter as I dithered over one of these questions.
Diving in the Virgin Islands. I lost sight of the boat and had to swim to a tiny, deserted island. After a great deal of time, the rescue boat saw me waving for my life on the rocks.
I was nearly hit by an enormous gold-fibreglass cherub in a shopping centre. It fell five storeys and smashed into a thousand pieces about 4ft away from me.
I’ve been asleep at the wheel on the M11, had an engine fire over the Atlantic in a light aircraft, driven unprotected through an enemy firing zone to do a gig in wartime Sarajevo – the list goes on and on. But I did have stage 3 throat cancer and was cured by some fantastic UK medics.
I’d have been there on the spot for every major news story I’ve talked about in the studio, at the time it happened.
Every offended interviewee who thought I was asking hard questions for some personal reason. It’s never personal.
As devastatingly talented, gorgeous and wise, but I’m not betting on it.
A chihuahua giving you a cuddle.
I did a terrible job of fixing the downstairs loo once.
My daughter talking to her friends even though I thought I’d disabled her devices.
Edwina Currie, Winston Churchill, Louis Theroux, Clive Myrie, John Lewis, Edmund Hillary
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