Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
This is a standing question in The Guardian's decades-long The Q&A and also recurs independently in career and life interviews.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 4 November 2023 source ↗
In African families, you can be one of three things: a doctor, a lawyer or a failure. I wanted to be an Egyptologist, but things worked out in the end.
Exactly what I am now.
I was fidgety and clueless for a long time.
An actress. My family thought it was ridiculous, it was like saying you wanted to be an astronaut.
I’ve had a few hairy scrapes as a scuba diver.
The music journalist Paul Morley described me as bland.
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.
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.
Both my grandmother and my mother got dementia. My grandmother has passed away. My mother is in a home. Dementia is my biggest fear because it robs you of the very thing that makes life special.
A few zeros on my bank balance.
David Harewood, Joanna Scanlan, Zack Polanski, Alison Moyet, Mathew Horne, Mellody Hobson
Search the directory for somebody in particular.