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.
I’ve had a few hairy scrapes as a scuba diver.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 4 November 2023 source ↗
I was close to death, and I didn't rush into my spirit. I spent the time in the hospital just looking at the pipes on the ceiling. ... I failed because this was a trauma, a trauma, and I'm not reacting to it spiritually.
In 2012 I stared into the eyes of someone who had just stabbed a man in the neck on the street. I was trying to help the victim; for a very long three or four seconds, I thought he was going to come for me next.
Twice I should have died in car accidents when both my cars were written off. I was completely unhurt; the cello was completely unhurt, too. A complete miracle.
When interviewing Idi Amin of Uganda in 1975, he shouted: “We have ways of dealing with people like you.”
I worked in a chicken factory in the Netherlands when I was 16.
A foreign correspondent.
I am mortified that we went into Afghanistan, promised to liberate the female population and, 20 years later, dumped them in a situation as bad, robbing girls of their futures.
The music journalist Paul Morley described me as bland.
During the first three months of the first lockdown. I was at home with my family and I was such a cliche: I was baking sourdough, making my own granola. It was an idyllic time.
Reading a newspaper.
Shirley Ballas, Noah Harari, Julia Ormond, Shappi Khorsandi, Edwina Currie, Julie Hesmondhalgh
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