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.
When the media, en masse, reported my imminent demise.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 19 July 2025 source ↗
Being offered a lift by James Acaster.
Falling down a mine shaft in New Mexico while filming.
I’m getting closer all the time.
The print size in my mind decreased with time’s incremental decline, and as I arrived at the last word – weeks – it suddenly struck me, with all the force of the fullest sense of the word ‘struck’, that this could actually be his answer and not just the logical next time period in my sentence. Every cell in my body, except those responsible for maintaining a reasonable, calm exterior, was now lindy-hopping at that possibility, the only one that hadn’t occurred to me until that moment.
To experience the utter powerlessness of locked-in syndrome.
Becoming doubly incontinent.
On tour during Christmas vacation at Cambridge with its European Theatre Group, playing Shakespeare. I knew it was the best time of my life.
To my mother for disappointing her. Mummy wanted me to be a different sort of person from who I am, but one can’t change oneself.
Short. Fat. Jewish.
I wanted to be a doctor, like my father.
Terry O'Neill, Jake Shears, Adam Clayton, Tom Ellis, Sheryl Crow, Peter Capaldi
Search the directory for somebody in particular.