Last year, driving in California, I found myself on the wrong side of the road. I was 30 seconds away from hitting two cars coming the other way.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 6 May 2017 source ↗
The question
How close have you come to death?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.
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Others on this question
View all 216 →
Ronnie Wood
English rock musician
I can dodge the bullets – I’m lucky.
Throat and neck cancer in 2018. They told me six to eight months if it hadn’t been caught.
Kate Nash
British musician
I had heart surgery when I was 17. The other time was when I fell off my piano. My head was an inch away from a metal step.
Marc Almond
English singer
The motorcycle crash, but also when a neon sign fell on my head in Soho in the 90s.
More from Aidan Gillen
View profile →Teachers at my school, for being such a smartarse.
Pyramid Song, by Radiohead, live.
The floral waistcoat and shocking-pink shirt combo I wore on my 21st.
Cleaning around the feet of John Malkovich with industrial carpet cleaner while he was trying to learn lines in the foyer of a theatre.
A stuntman. Evel Knievel was an icon.
I won a local art competition aged 10 – the first time I’d won anything.
More on death & what remains
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- What happens when we die? 57 answers
- What would you like to leave your children? 54 answers
- If you had only one day left to live, how would you spend it — and what would you deliberately avoid doing? 54 answers
- How would you like to die? 46 answers
Also answered this
Noel Clarke, Reggie Yates, Madhur Jaffrey, Carlos Acosta, Charles Dance, Martin Clunes
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