The question
What would you most want to leave your children?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
Verbatim recurring item in The Guardian Q&A; two publisher-hosted respondent pages establish institutional recurrence.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
A sense of what’s right, a few quid and some nice paintings.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 23 August 2025 source ↗
A great education.
So it seems to be my responsibility, particularly to my children, also to my wife and friends, is not to be Pollyanna and pretend everything's okay no one would take me seriously if I said that but it's to be as present in their lives now as I can be so that in years to come, they don't feel either guilty or bad at my having been left out of their lives, that they feel still a very strong not a memory of particular actions but a memory of a complete family rather than a broken one. That seems to be something I can do or try to do.
A house in west London.
A spirit of generosity.
This was said about me in a Radio 1 focus group: “I don’t pay my licence fee to hear scummy northerners.”
Fairly decent bloke.
Throat and neck cancer in 2018. They told me six to eight months if it hadn’t been caught.
A drummer in a famous band or an astronaut.
Heights, something happening to my children and Manchester United getting good again (I’m a Man City fan).
A nice long rest.
Keir Starmer, Paul Kalanithi, Midge Ure, Juliet Stevenson, Mariella Frostrup, Clare Bailey Mosley
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