Working as the assistant to an agony aunt on a women’s magazine. When we didn’t get enough heartbreaking letters, we made them up.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 23 April 2022 source ↗
The question
What is the worst job you have ever had?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
The Guardian's long-running Q&A repeatedly asks this standing question, with minor tense variation.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Working as the assistant to an agony aunt on a women’s magazine. When we didn’t get enough heartbreaking letters, we made them up.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 23 April 2022 source ↗
Two days as a labourer in my 15th summer.
I worked in a call centre. I would go clubbing on a Saturday with my brother and my mates, get home for five or six in the morning, and then have to be at work at 8am.
I’ve never had a job.
Washing dishes when I was a student.
Meryl Streep. For all her truthful and perfected offerings that have taken me to an “elsewhere”, in which my mind could feel both soothed and stimulated.
We live in a fearful age: Brexit, Covid, global warming, cancel culture, war in Ukraine. Add in pancreatic cancer and you find me in an advanced and complex state of anxiety.
Like coming home.
The film of Restoration. A beautiful cast. An award-winning designer. A massive budget. A dog’s dinner.
When I first met Richard, in 1992, on a British Council writers’ tour of Adelaide. We were drinking Australian lager while parakeets squawked rudely in the neighbourhood gumtrees.
The only drink I really, really like is champagne.
Paterson Joseph, Ann Patchett, Sara Pascoe, Jo Nesbø, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Adam Kay
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