Vic, my wife, has over the years reduced my impatience, but anybody who has been in a traffic jam with me will know that she hasn’t completed the task yet.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 19 August 2023 source ↗
The question
Which trait in yourself do you like least?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
The Guardian's The Q&A has retained this Proust-derived prompt from at least 2007 through 2026, and ABC independently put it to the Obamas in 2011.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Vic, my wife, has over the years reduced my impatience, but anybody who has been in a traffic jam with me will know that she hasn’t completed the task yet.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 19 August 2023 source ↗
When I ruin someone else’s story because I think mine is better, so butt in before they’ve finished theirs.
I can’t say no. I am a people-pleaser, and it means that I burn myself out because I take on too much.
Craving the kind of success I pretend to despise.
My driving skills.
My mum died in her early 70s, and for the last six or seven years of her life she couldn’t move, didn’t speak. By the time our children were born, she was too ill to communicate. I haven’t many regrets in life, but I do regret that they never got to know her, even though she was still alive for a few years. They couldn’t see her warmth, her spirit, her courage.
Failure. I hate losing, particularly at football and politics. I play five-a-side every week – middle of midfield, barking orders. Some people say it’s the taking part that counts. I am not in that camp. It’s the winning that counts.
There are yards and yards and yards of abuse every day. I ignore the lot of it.
Having more time to spend with Vic and the kids.
As someone who delivered a bold and reforming Labour government, as a great dad and a great friend.
Before I was DPP, I did a lot of work trying to get rid of the death penalty in various countries, and one was Malawi. We’d been in court in Zomba and had to get a plane in Lilongwe, about 200 miles away. We got a local taxi: the guy changed his wheels for the journey because the car wasn’t roadworthy and then hurtled at speed, mostly on the wrong side of the road. I’ve never been so terrified.
Ed Koch, Malala Yousafzai, Zack Polanski, Rory Stewart, Barack Obama, Jon Sopel
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