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 ↗
Any time I’ve been racially profiled. The words might be different, but the feeling is the same.
Glenda Jackson said I was an amateur during rehearsal for The White Devil at the Old Vic. I called her a cow, but that was inadequate.
“Let’s face it, you’re not Ingrid Bergman.” I was 19 and he was a potential boyfriend. My only thought at the time was: “I’m not?”
An English teacher said, “You’ll never make anything of yourself.”
A detective, a train driver on the underground and Leyton Orient’s centre forward.
Frightening, exhilarating and all-consuming.
When I was 16, I’d just won full scholarships to both the Royal Academy and the Royal College of Music, and felt like the world was my oyster.
My cello. At the time, in 1983, it was £192,500.
Nothing: the good times, the bad times, they make your character.
Seeing Leyton Orient in the premiership.
David Hasselhoff, Desmond Tutu, Billy Crudup, Pauline Black, Hugh Skinner, Bruno Tonioli
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