Paul Merson
English footballer and pundit
Going back to addiction.
What is your greatest fear?
Question
What would you like to leave your children?
Death & what remains
Question
Who most deserves an apology from you, and why?
Failure & regret
Question
When were you happiest?
Time & hindsight
Question
How close have you come to death?
Death & what remains
Question
What single thing would improve the quality of your life?
Daily life
Question
What is the worst job you have done?
Craft & work
Originally asked
Vanity Fair, to its interview subject, The Proust Questionnaire
The exact prompt is fixed in Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire and independently sustained in The Guardian's The Q&A over multiple decades.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Both my grandmother and my mother got dementia. My grandmother has passed away. My mother is in a home. Dementia is my biggest fear because it robs you of the very thing that makes life special.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 4 November 2023 source ↗
Others on this question
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Edward Enninful
Ghanaian-born English editor and stylist
When I get to the restaurant and don’t see any hot sauce on the table.
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.
Drowning. The feeling of not being able to take a breath. I’m sure my therapist would have something to say about the deep psychological reasons for it.
More from Mariella Frostrup
View profile →A sense of the world being full of possibility and it being in their hands to make it a better one.
I am mortified that we went into Afghanistan, promised to liberate the female population and, 20 years later, dumped them in a situation as bad, robbing girls of their futures.
During the first three months of the first lockdown. I was at home with my family and I was such a cliche: I was baking sourdough, making my own granola. It was an idyllic time.
I’ve had a few hairy scrapes as a scuba diver.
A few zeros on my bank balance.
I worked in a chicken factory in the Netherlands when I was 16.
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- All identity & self questions
- The The Proust Questionnaire questionnaire — 5 questions from the same format
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