Outliving my kids – and rats.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 11 March 2023 source ↗
The question
What do you fear most?Originally asked
Vanity Fair, to its interview subject, The Proust Questionnaire
The exact prompt is fixed in Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire and independently sustained in The Guardian's The Q&A over multiple decades.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Outliving my kids – and rats.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 11 March 2023 source ↗
Child, loss or damage thereof.
Running out of Molecule cologne.
To lose the ability to do my work.
Overcooking pasta for my Italian family in Napoli – they would kill me.
A couple of years ago we moved to East Sussex – I had been living in London for 35 years – and couldn’t work out why I kept waking up and thinking, what’s that sound? It was actually silence.
Arrogance, bullying, meanness – just try to be kind, it’s not difficult.
Working in a very busy bar in the West End when I was trying to pay my way through drama school. I had to dance in a cage in a vest and cycling shorts to Venus by Bananarama, Greased Lightnin’ and Y.M.C.A. every night. It was excruciating.
Live in the moment. Enjoy life because time cruelly speeds up as you get older and becomes scarily finite.
After the birth of both my children, although Manchester United winning the treble in 1999 came pretty close.
Going to pieces while meeting John Squire, the lead guitarist of the Stone Roses, backstage after a gig. I completely lost the ability to speak. I told him I had the same guitars as he’d just used on stage, and when he asked me which ones, the words completely went out of my head and there was a huge pause, and then his wife tapped his shoulder and he wandered off.
Willem Dafoe, Angela Griffin, Rita Moreno, Omid Djalili, Fay Ripley, Lily Tomlin
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