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.
When I was doing my gold swimming badge. I had to get undressed in a swimming pool and had forgotten my gym kit, so the teacher gave me a kit two sizes too small. In the water, I got my arms up over my head to get the shirt off and they locked. I sank to the bottom of the pool and sat there until a girl jumped in and dragged me back up again.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 24 June 2017 source ↗
A plane to San Francisco, 25 years ago. There was a bang and I looked out of the window and saw flames coming out of one of the engines. We zoomed down to the airport below.
At each of my theatre premieres.
Watching Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.
In 1989, in Cuba, about to board a plane for Milan, where I was going to school for a year. The visa didn’t arrive in time, so I couldn’t board. The plane crashed and people died.
When I heard John Noakes had died.
A television. I don’t care for things. When I moved, I downsized and threw away most of my possessions.
I have the invisibility of a middle-aged woman. I live in Brighton, and feel for the first time in my life that I belong. My kids are safe, my husband’s in a good place and we have a roof over our head: I can’t imagine needing more than that.
For a while I wanted to be a policewoman, but I didn’t have five O-levels.
I’d have made more of my education.
A 12-hour nightshift at a toy factory in Southend.
Courtney Pine, Rick Astley, Jo Nesbø, Yann Tiersen, Sheryl Crow, Jake Shears
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