The question
When were you most embarrassed?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
A verbatim recurring question in The Guardian's Q&A series.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
I was followed by a mob of fans when I was doing a photoshoot in Paris. When I signed autographs for them during a break, one remarked: “Who the fuck is Harlan Coben? I told you it wasn’t Bruce Willis.”
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 3 August 2024 source ↗
Sending a text meant for my wife to Dara O'Briain by mistake, revealing myself to be a control freak.
The idiocy of going to Skye from New Zealand in April 2020. All of a sudden, I’m turning on the news and hearing myself as an item. I have never been more mortified.
When I was losing my sight, I couldn’t see where I was going, and I went into an undertaker’s thinking it was a barber’s. I asked the undertaker whether he had many waiting.
I was in Oliver! when I was 10 and I peed myself on stage in front of however many people the Palladium holds. It was the stuff of nightmares.
With a wistful smile.
A white-hot explosion that turns into a comforting warmth.
I don’t even voice them. Perhaps the books are my outlet here.
I’ve made a lot of mistakes, but if I could go back and fix the mistake, I wouldn’t be here.
We are too often advised to live life to the fullest. That’s too much pressure. The key is to find joy and poignancy in the quiet and mundane. Life is lived between the so-called big moments.
I worked a janitorial job, cleaning university dormitories after students had gone home for the summer. You can’t imagine the condition some of those rooms were in. They could have doubled as sets for a slasher film.
Pauline McLynn, Jack Whitehall, Jane Asher, Maggie O'Farrell, Fay Ripley, Richard Coles
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