The question
Excluding property, what is the most expensive thing you have ever bought?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
The Guardian's weekly The Q&A repeatedly uses this standing prompt, with minor contractions and word-order variation.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
My hybrid car. Not glamorous, not fast, but indispensable.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 17 February 2024 source ↗
When I was 24 or 25, I bought a Warhol canvas. It was a lot of money to throw down on a little painting, but I’ve always loved art.
A page from Jim Morrison’s final notebook – I bought it as a birthday gift for a friend.
A 1956 Selmer silver alto saxophone.
My husband and I own some art, but we are not huge spenders.
To everyone I’ve bored.
When I started as a researcher in the BBC, I was working for an editor who was a self-confessed misogynist. He used to practise shooting by aiming his air gun at an aerosol can balanced just over my head. I made it a matter of pride not to flinch as the pellets whizzed by.
Like intoxication, sometimes followed by a hangover.
Young, beautiful, deluded.
Maybe I should have agreed to take the job of controller of BBC One when Bill Cotton offered it to me. I do feel a wimp; I would have been the first woman in the job.What do you consider your greatest achievement? I don’t really claim credit, I hope, for helping to launch Childline and the Silver Line and Silver Stories. It is an achievement that they all exist, but that is down to their amazing teams.
A teacher and a nightclub singer.
Cybill Shepherd, Warwick Davis, Stephen Dorff, Michael Kiwanuka, Courtney Pine, Martin Freeman
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