A piece of scenery fell on my head during Richard II at the Globe theatre in 2019. I was very badly hurt.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 25 October 2025 source ↗
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.
A piece of scenery fell on my head during Richard II at the Globe theatre in 2019. I was very badly hurt.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 25 October 2025 source ↗
Coming under attack while reporting in Iraq.
Today is a pretty important day. It was August 15th, 2007, when I was told I likely had "three to six months of good health left." Today is six months from that day. Just to prove I'm still alive, here I am, holding today's New York Times! I rode my bike today; the cumulative effects of the chemotherapy are hurting my stamina some, but I bet I can still run a quarter mile faster than most Americans. The doctors weren't wrong; they always said that if the palliative chemo worked, I'd buy more time, but that it was a long shot. And the doctors have done a brilliant job of tweaking my regimen to help my odds. How much longer this will work is hard to know, but I'm going to keep having fun every day I have left, no matter how many or how few of them I get.
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 was invited to Sharon Tate’s house the night she was murdered. I declined the invite due to jetlag.
I tried my best.
In recent times, when I was looking after my mum. She would take me on journeys in her mind and I’d travel with her wherever she went. I felt happy that I had the opportunity to have that time despite her illness.
I think we live on in people’s memories until those memories go.
That I don’t give myself enough credit.
Curious, kind and frustrating – because I ask too many questions.
When I was younger, I signed up to a job agency and thought I would be doing secretarial work, but they assigned me to clean toilets in a factory in Oldham.
Meghann Fahy, Robert Peston, Marcus Mumford, Fiona Allen, Emma Bunton, Hamza Yassin
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