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.
Watching Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 24 May 2025 source ↗
Swimming off the north Cornish coast eight years ago. I remember thinking, “Why did they teach you how to inflate your pyjamas in life-saving classes at school, when they could have just told you what to do in a riptide?”
Last year, driving in California, I found myself on the wrong side of the road. I was 30 seconds away from hitting two cars coming the other way.
I’ve had a few hairy scrapes as a scuba diver.
Probably when I didn’t sleep for a week on drugs in 2009. I’d had a lot of meth and my heart felt like it was giving out. I remember climbing over balconies really high up, and I thought I was going to die, until I eventually fell asleep in someone’s garden.
A pearl diver in Japan.
Is that the final mix?
You have to go to the end of the line.
Signing away the rights to my life story to a major motion-picture company for a sum that I have since been told was way below the market rate.
Watching all of Fellini’s movies one summer.
Shucking oysters one summer in Nice.
Omid Djalili, Sara Cox, Graydon Carter, Liam Gallagher, Bryn Terfel, Scott Mills
Search the directory for somebody in particular.