The question
Which trait in yourself do you like least?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
The Guardian's The Q&A has retained this Proust-derived prompt from at least 2007 through 2026, and ABC independently put it to the Obamas in 2011.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
I still say yes to too many things.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 21 March 2026 source ↗
When I’m feeling lazy and I sleep in too much.
Holding a grudge.
Oversharing. I long to be intimately connected to people and sometimes, among strangers, I don’t read the room.
My inability to say no.
Living in a campervan for a week with Timmy Mallett for a children’s TV show about 40 years ago.
Like I would die for them in a nanosecond.
I was happiest in every aspect of my life in the 1990s, when I was married to Paddy [King, a management consultant] and we had the two children and my mum lived with us, and Countdown was the biggest show on Channel 4.
My aeroplane, a Diamond DA42. It’s a twin-engine aircraft and I bought her brand new to fly around the world solo. Very sadly my mum was diagnosed with terminal cancer about six weeks before I was due to take off, in May 2017, and she died early June. After that, I lost interest in doing it.
A fighter pilot.
I genuinely can’t remember crying.
Meghan Trainor, Rose Tremain, Alex Lawther, Tim Peake, Erin O'Connor, Alfred Molina
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