The question
What is the harshest thing anyone has said to you?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
A fixed Guardian Q&A prompt asked directly across respondents and years.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
The melanoma has returned in your lung.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 13 September 2025 source ↗
I’m not interested.
I like you but I wish you looked more like David Beckham.
“Your career will be over if you have the baby.”To whom would you most like to say sorry, and why? My parents, for my teenage years. I tried to run away when I was 15. We lived in a fishing village in France and, with my boyfriend, I headed to Spain to sell arts and crafts on the beach. Mum came and took me home.
It happened when I was younger, somewhere outside London. We were on bikes, and this older girl pulled up and said something racist that I won’t repeat. I will never forget that, because it was the first time, and I was like, “Oh, I am feeling different from everyone around me right now”.
Brave, naughty, diligent.
Totalitarianism in Europe.
Getting elected as MP for the Rhondda in 2001 despite everyone saying I was too “exotic” or “flamboyant”, ie gay.
A dog, though my husband would prefer a cat.
When I worked out I was gay and decided to leave the church at 29.
Zelenskyy for holding out against Putin.
Rory Stewart, Clive Myrie, Jon Snow, Desmond Tutu, Keir Starmer, Zack Polanski
Search the directory for somebody in particular.