When my first husband died, because it felt like my life was over, and it was challenging to keep in life at the time.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 23 September 2023 source ↗
The question
How close have you come to dying?Originally asked
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You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
When my first husband died, because it felt like my life was over, and it was challenging to keep in life at the time.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 23 September 2023 source ↗
In the early 90s, in the Andes, caught in an atrocious storm above 20,000ft with three others. We were all in a very bad way. Some guys close to us perished; we were lucky.
Modelling in South Korea, aged 19. After a party, I flopped into bed, lit a big candle and balanced it on top of a massive box of matches. I created my own firework display when the candle burnt down and set fire to it. It made the biggest noise ever which, luckily, woke me from my slightly boozy slumber.
Nearly crashing into a train on one film, almost falling out of a hot-air balloon on another, narrowly avoiding getting knocked over by a taxi …
On a flight between Beijing and London with Team GB divers. There was a fire on the plane. We landed on a long-abandoned strip in Siberia. Two days later, the same flight attendants told us we had beaten the odds by surviving.
Listening to a song that my brother-in-law – the brother of Jason, my first husband – wrote, about how hard it was to live without his brother.
I remember being a teenager and writing this romantic short story in the style of the Brontës on a computer and I didn’t realise that the person whose computer it was could just print it out. A group of boys had a couple of pages and they were all reading it.
My mum, for the way that she brought up her three children and managed to make her money work. She worked as a cleaner for all these families we went to church with. She would cycle there with my little sister on the back of her bike – we didn’t have a car. She had an amazing mind for planning and organising so that we got to do ballet, we went to Brownies.
I worked in a cafe, which I loved, but when it was quiet we had to scrape the fat out from between the tiles on the floor with a butter knife.
My mum looks after our kids all the time, but on the very few weeks she takes time off, doing it all is a big juggle. My mum is a combination of Mary Poppins and Angela Davis, so I’d clone her.
I’m not really ashamed, but I haven’t read Lord of the Rings.
Jenny Diski, Adam Peaty, Krishnan Guru-Murthy, Charles Dance, Martin Clunes, Anna Friel
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