MO
“You’ll never walk again.” This was when I was eight or nine and recovering from viral encephalitis.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 25 March 2023 source ↗
The question
What is the harshest thing anyone has said to you?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
A fixed Guardian Q&A prompt asked directly across respondents and years.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Others on this question
View all 122 →Why is your nose so wonky?
Richard Coles
British musician, writer, presenter and priest
“I could never love you like that.”
It happened when I was younger, somewhere outside London. We were on bikes, and this older girl pulled up and said something racist that I won’t repeat. I will never forget that, because it was the first time, and I was like, “Oh, I am feeling different from everyone around me right now”.
“You pinko!” by a Tory minister signing off at the end of an interview with me during the EU referendum campaign.
More from Maggie O'Farrell
View profile →I started stammering badly the first time I was on live radio, on Woman’s Hour on Radio 4. When I think about it now it brings me out in a cold sweat.
Last week, while I was wet-wrapping my child’s chronic eczema.
Interrupting or talking over people. As a stammerer, I am particularly alert to this.
To keep going and never give up, and to enjoy it to the absolute full because, at any moment, the curtain can fall.
Last summer, swimming in a waterfall in Cumbria with my daughters.
All my clothes are secondhand, but I did buy a pair of new silver Vivienne Westwood shoes to get married in, which I still have.
More on failure & regret
- What disappointment has stayed with you longest? 367 answers
- Who deserves an apology from you, and for what? 209 answers
- If you could revise one chapter of your past, what would you change? 203 answers
- When were you most embarrassed? 122 answers
- How has a setback or failure set you up for later success? 69 answers
- What is the hardest thing that has happened to you, and what did you carry out of it? 35 answers
Also answered this
Richard Coles, Jack Whitehall, Adam Kay, Robert Carlyle, Paapa Essiedu, Olly Alexander
Search the directory for somebody in particular.
Explore further
- All failure & regret questions
- The The Q&A questionnaire — 25 questions from the same format
- Explore the archive — by field, age, era, and subject