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.
Last Christmas I was clipped by a train. Mum was dying so my head was elsewhere. I was walking home and had to cross one of those crossings that say, “Stop, look and listen.” I didn’t do any of those things, and I had my headphones in so I couldn’t even hear the train. It clipped my left elbow.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 21 December 2019 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.
When I was young, I was pretty reckless – my 20s were quite hedonistic. I don’t know whether I’ve been close to death, but I may have been without realising.
A car crash in the Utah mountains in 2005. We were driving from Arizona to Salt Lake City to go to a basketball game and the car slipped on black ice and we skidded off the motorway, flipped over and rolled down a ravine. The police officer said it was the worst accident he’d seen in 18 years when nobody died.
I’m closer today than I was yesterday.
Yesterday, because grief creeps up on you.
I wanted to be a prosthetic makeup artist after watching A Nightmare On Elm Street.
Insomnia. I go to bed at 9.30pm and listen to Radio 4.
A Christian Dior coat.
As a half-decent actor.
Laurence Fox, Brendan Gleeson, Felicity Jones, John Malkovich, Paapa Essiedu, Adrian Edmondson
Search the directory for somebody in particular.