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 ↗
I’m getting closer all the time.
A picnic on the beach at Seaforth during the war. Somehow I managed to wriggle through a barbed-wire fence and run across a minefield. My teenage aunt Kat bravely followed suit and rescued me.
About five years ago, a half-tonne tree branch fell and missed me by three feet.
I had a cardiac arrest in 2010. I also had a close call in the early days in Cardiff when I was in a band called the Denims. We were in a van driving along a narrow mountain road. Somebody wanted to go to the toilet, so we stopped, and afterwards the driver took a wrong turn and we went careering down the mountain. Everyone was screaming, it was like a nightmare. At the bottom was the railway line, but the van stopped just in time. We were very lucky.
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
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