The question
What worries you about getting older?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
A newer fixed question in The Guardian's rotating Q&A pool.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Not being able to perform adequately.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 12 April 2025 source ↗
It’s often the same with any new, revolutionary thing. People get stuck as they get older. Our minds are sort of electrochemical computers. Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them.
Mostly the pain. I don’t want to be trapped in a body that hurts.
Absolutely nothing. It’s a privilege.
I am genuinely buzzed about it! I think we just keep getting better, smarter, wiser, truer, happier.
It was a small gig and I was doing Three Minute Hero, which has a long, held note at the end, and I fell off the stage.
I was called the N-word in Romford, by someone stepping off a train as I was getting on.
Nineteen Eighty-Four. I always meant to read it before 1984, and once 1984 had passed I didn’t see the point.
I don’t have children. I will leave my nieces money because girls need money of their own. Anything to make women independent.
An umbilical cord.
Giving barium enemas. I used to be a radiographer in Coventry.
Maurice Sendak, Edmund Hillary, Andrew Ridgeley, Nuala McGovern, Kate Humble, Jon Sopel
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