The question
Excluding property, what is the most expensive thing you have ever bought?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
The Guardian's weekly The Q&A repeatedly uses this standing prompt, with minor contractions and word-order variation.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
My hybrid car. Not glamorous, not fast, but indispensable.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 17 February 2024 source ↗
Three mature palm trees. We restored a property in Italy that had been derelict and I needed to make it look established as quickly as I could.
My Birkin bags, which I plan to pass on to my future children.
A Chanel dress. I bought it with my first proper paycheck and it was ridiculously expensive. It is also hideous.
An apocalypse escape vessel – a steel hull ice-capable sailing boat for all the family that has almost zero electronics and is manual operation throughout – armed with an array of weaponry.
Alan Bates, Lord Arbuthnot and Nick Wallis for exposing the Post Office and Fujitsu and, let’s hope, for ensuring everyone is properly compensated.
When I started as a researcher in the BBC, I was working for an editor who was a self-confessed misogynist. He used to practise shooting by aiming his air gun at an aerosol can balanced just over my head. I made it a matter of pride not to flinch as the pellets whizzed by.
Maybe I should have agreed to take the job of controller of BBC One when Bill Cotton offered it to me. I do feel a wimp; I would have been the first woman in the job.What do you consider your greatest achievement? I don’t really claim credit, I hope, for helping to launch Childline and the Silver Line and Silver Stories. It is an achievement that they all exist, but that is down to their amazing teams.
Like intoxication, sometimes followed by a hangover.
Possible dementia.
A teacher and a nightclub singer.
Dominic Cooper, Sara Cox, Emilia Fox, Courtney Pine, Martin Freeman, Stephen Dorff
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