The failed attempt at a home perm on myself in the 80s. I wanted to look like Kelly McGillis in Top Gun.
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, 21 March 2026 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 230 →Cleaning the changing rooms at Kensington leisure centre from the age of 16.
There have been things within the Kaiser Chiefs I’ve hated – some corporate gigs that I didn’t feel good doing.
I haven’t really had a job. I used to work at my dad’s garden centre in my late teens, but it was just messing around.
More from Carol Vorderman
View profile →I was happiest in every aspect of my life in the 1990s, when I was married to Paddy [King, a management consultant] and we had the two children and my mum lived with us, and Countdown was the biggest show on Channel 4.
I genuinely can’t remember crying.
My aeroplane, a Diamond DA42. It’s a twin-engine aircraft and I bought her brand new to fly around the world solo. Very sadly my mum was diagnosed with terminal cancer about six weeks before I was due to take off, in May 2017, and she died early June. After that, I lost interest in doing it.
A fighter pilot.
There are one or two relationships where I’d see the red flags much earlier.
Like I would die for them in a nanosecond.
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