I choked on a hard-boiled lemon sweet when I was 13. My brother Sam saved me.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 29 August 2020 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.
I choked on a hard-boiled lemon sweet when I was 13. My brother Sam saved me.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 29 August 2020 source ↗
How many times I could have died before now, and in how many different ways. And yet I came close only once: a speeding sedan ran a red light, hit three other vehicles, and jack-knifed into my rear wheel split second after I’d stepped out of my parked car. A bystander described the scene to me later. “You were a millimetre away from losing your legs,” he said.
This is a lot harder for you than it is for me. If you had gone to bed as many nights as I did in the old days knowing that you had taken so much stuff that could kill you and not knowing if you would wake up, this is not as shocking as you think.
Nearly crashing into a train on one film, almost falling out of a hot-air balloon on another, narrowly avoiding getting knocked over by a taxi …
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.
Retaining my sense of self in an insecure job.
I never said it out loud, but I had this “Why aren’t you like the other mums?” energy towards my mum. Now I am an adult, I am happy that she came here from Ghana and remained who she was, but for a long time I resented her.
Run to the Sun by NERD. I’ve always loved that song. People always think that Pharrell [Williams] wrote it about a lover but it was about his grandmother, who passed away. My brother was a massive NERD fan – he got me into them and there’s something so pure and loving about that song. I want my funeral to be a joyous occasion, I want people to rave and to wear bright colours. But for the moment of reflection, I want that song.
Better bike lanes in London.
When I was 11 and we got Sky TV.
Kate Nash, Roger McGough, Keir Starmer, Sandy Powell, Monty Don, Julian Lloyd Webber
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