The question
What period or moment in your life brought you the most joy?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
Asked in 52 of the 131 consecutive instalments of The Guardian's The Q&A harvested on 2026-08-29.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Recently, when I got out of hospital and into my own bed with my wife and 10-year-old son; we watched some crap television and life had never seemed better.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 3 December 2016 source ↗
When my son was about three years old and I was working at the National Theatre. I remember cycling from Twickenham, and thinking, “This is the golden age: I’ll never be happier or more content than this.”
When the war was over—whichever war that was.
This morning when I woke up. I am generally happy.
As a boy in a tree.
The problem with my job is that you meet people you admire and then you don’t admire them so much. The only one I carried on admiring was Nelson Mandela.
Comfort, warmth and security.
I’d like to say sorry to my mother. I had to choose between my parents, and I chose my father because he didn’t have any other kids. (My mother was a war widow and had two children from her first marriage.) I thought, in a childish way, that one had to be fair. It was very difficult for my mother and me, and we never really got over it.
Reading the news. It’s a dull job.
I would have behaved better to my first wife, and the girl I lived with afterwards. I was always away.
Edmund Hillary, Vince Cable, Jerry Springer, Nick Robinson, Anita Rani, Joan Bakewell
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