Doing a compulsory standup routine in my first week of drama school.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 9 May 2026 source ↗
The question
How close have you come to dying?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
A recurring Guardian Q&A prompt asked directly across respondents and years.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Doing a compulsory standup routine in my first week of drama school.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 9 May 2026 source ↗
Just thinking about unsafe sex.
The print size in my mind decreased with time’s incremental decline, and as I arrived at the last word – weeks – it suddenly struck me, with all the force of the fullest sense of the word ‘struck’, that this could actually be his answer and not just the logical next time period in my sentence. Every cell in my body, except those responsible for maintaining a reasonable, calm exterior, was now lindy-hopping at that possibility, the only one that hadn’t occurred to me until that moment.
In 2016, the moment my agent rang me to tell me I’d got the part of Hamlet for the RSC. While I was on the phone, I looked to my left and turned to the right, and a bus whizzed by and the wing mirror was so close to me that it knocked my hat off.
Climbing in Tibet, surfing in Australia and a moment ago by a courgette cutter as I dithered over one of these questions.
Endless vomiting. That comes from my emetophobia, which is a huge part of my OCD.
Anyone who can pick up a house spider with their bare hands.
Getting to 39 without having a filling in my teeth.
Congratulating Dua Lipa on managing to release a single in such a tough industry, because I thought she was a struggling indie artist. I Googled her the next day and realised that she has 88 million followers.
I’d swap out a few boyfriends.
Christmas elf at the Rainforest Cafe.
Anna Friel, Martin Clunes, Charles Dance, Krishnan Guru-Murthy, Adam Peaty, Jenny Diski
Search the directory for somebody in particular.