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.
When the surgeon told me I wouldn’t be able to play the cello again, in 2013. I have a herniated disc and it’s pressing on a nerve in my neck. I announced I was stopping playing in 2014. I absolutely did not want to stop.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 15 July 2023 source ↗
“You’re getting old.” My son Harris was factually correct, but I didn’t need to hear it.
Somebody wrote that my voice was more numbing than novocaine.
A friend said, “If you remembered everything you did, you’d kill yourself.” He’s sort of crazy, but he’s probably right.
A radio presenter said I had yellow teeth – to my face. When I was 45, a manager in LA said I was too old to work in Hollywood; and then she rang my agent and said, “Can you tell your client never to wear that perfume again because it made me feel sick.”
My cello. At the time, in 1983, it was £192,500.
Seeing Leyton Orient in the premiership.
Our beautiful cat was so ill that we were hours away from having her put down. Somehow, we’ve managed to nurse her back to full health again.
Twice I should have died in car accidents when both my cars were written off. I was completely unhurt; the cello was completely unhurt, too. A complete miracle.
A detective, a train driver on the underground and Leyton Orient’s centre forward.
Nothing: the good times, the bad times, they make your character.
Charles Dance, Erin O'Connor, Alex Lawther, Rebecca Lucy Taylor, Imogen Poots, Nick Frost
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