The question
What period or moment in your life brought you the most joy?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
Asked in 52 of the 131 consecutive instalments of The Guardian's The Q&A harvested on 2026-08-29.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
I was a happy kid. I had quite a small life: I grew up in Walthamstow and didn’t really leave east London. I didn’t go to the South Bank for the first time until I was 18 years old.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 18 November 2023 source ↗
The day my daughter, Clara, was born, and pretty much every day since.
Flying in over London on a cool, clean morning after a long time away.
When I first met Richard, in 1992, on a British Council writers’ tour of Adelaide. We were drinking Australian lager while parakeets squawked rudely in the neighbourhood gumtrees.
I look at my nephew, who is five years old and in a perpetual state of bliss; I imagine that’s what I was like when I was five. That’s not to say I am unhappy now; I was on top of the world walking through a park to work this morning.
In 2016, the moment my agent rang me to tell me I’d got the part of Hamlet for the RSC. While I was on the phone, I looked to my left and turned to the right, and a bus whizzed by and the wing mirror was so close to me that it knocked my hat off.
I would really love to know my parents as an adult. I lost my dad when I was 14 and my mum when I was 20.
Called me the N-word.
In order to raise money to pay for myself to go to the National Youth Theatre, I performed a medley of my drama school speeches and some songs for my entire school. Considering I can’t sing, this was terrible. I did U Remind Me by Usher and Hey There Delilah by the Plain White T’s. They paid £2 each – basically, to laugh at me.
To find as many moments to laugh as possible.
After losing my mum still managing to finish drama school, because that was really difficult. I lost her in the first year.
Chris O'Dowd, Kylie Minogue, Sarah Parish, Shirley MacLaine, Una Stubbs, Jessica Raine
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