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.
Swimming off the north Cornish coast eight years ago. I remember thinking, “Why did they teach you how to inflate your pyjamas in life-saving classes at school, when they could have just told you what to do in a riptide?”
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 7 January 2017 source ↗
On a flight, last February, from Atlanta to Rio. We went through a storm and I was convinced that the plane was going down. The overhead cabins were opening, everything was falling out, people were screaming and I was hanging on to my seat.
I was on a cliff in Dartmoor, doing a Royal Marine abseil. I fell upside down and thought, “I’m going to die here.”
I made a suicide attempt at 12 or 13 years old.
A death threat at Glastonbury festival in 1989. The police told me not to go on, but I said I had to because I was headlining. So I wore a bullet-proof vest. It seemed unlikely that I would be assassinated, but it was shocking and very stressful.
Like you are standing with an army.
Ten years ago I bought a painting. I lived with it for a year before realising I didn’t like it at all. So it’s on my wall, mocking me daily.
My father, because he’s never run away from anything.
To anyone I’ve worked with between 5.30am and 8.30am. I am not a morning person.
Funerals are for the people left behind, so I don’t mind.
As I get older, I get happier.
Dan Stevens, Adeel Akhtar, David Arquette, Aidan Gillen, Noel Clarke, Adrian Edmondson
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