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.
In 2012 I stared into the eyes of someone who had just stabbed a man in the neck on the street. I was trying to help the victim; for a very long three or four seconds, I thought he was going to come for me next.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 11 August 2018 source ↗
I’ve had motorcycle accidents – I had one where I ended up in intensive care. But if you are on a frontline – which I have been – and people start shooting at you – which they have done – you put yourself in quite considerable danger. So: on a moving frontline in northern Afghanistan in 2001.
When I was about seven or eight years old, I was messing about in a brook with my brothers and a friend of mine, Paul Hewitt, and I almost drowned. Paul saved me.
This is a lot harder for you than it is for me. If you had gone to bed as many nights as I did in the old days knowing that you had taken so much stuff that could kill you and not knowing if you would wake up, this is not as shocking as you think.
Maybe in the 1990s, but I was so selfish at the time, I wouldn’t really have noticed what was going on.
When I was a teenager I worked as a lifeguard, and one of our duties was to clean the showers. It essentially involved cleaning people’s pubes from the drain.
Just to be remembered at all would be enough.
Noel Clarke, Madhur Jaffrey, Reggie Yates, Carlos Acosta, Charles Dance, Anna Friel
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