Nicholas Parsons: What single thing would improve the quality of your life?

What single thing would improve the quality of your life?

Originally asked

The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A

Verbatim recurring item in The Guardian Q&A; two fully readable publisher-hosted respondent pages establish institutional recurrence.

You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.

Recorded Nicholas Parsons said elsewhere, not written here

If there was a miracle pill that helped you to feel physically the same as you are mentally.

The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 15 August 2015 source ↗

Others on this question

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Indira Varma

Ultimately, a bigger hallway.

Recorded The Q&A, The Guardian, 13 April 2024 source ↗

Zack Polanski

Proportional representation.

Recorded The Q&A, The Guardian, 6 December 2025 source ↗

John Cooper Clarke English poet

A mobile phone.

Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 20 July 2013 source ↗

Christopher Hitchens Essayist, critic and journalist

My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends. I can’t eat or drink for pleasure anymore, so when they offer to come it’s only for the blessed chance to talk. Some of these comrades can easily fill a hall with paying customers avid to hear them: they are talkers with whom it’s a privilege just to keep up. Now at least I can do the listening for free. Can they come and see me? Yes, but only in a way. So now every day I go to a waiting room, and watch the awful news from Japan on cable TV (often closed-captioned, just to torture myself) and wait impatiently for a high dose of protons to be fired into my body at two-thirds the speed of light. What do I hope for? If not a cure, then a remission. And what do I want back? In the most beautiful apposition of two of the simplest words in our language: the freedom of speech.

Recorded Vanity Fair, 9 May 2011 source ↗