The question
How close have you come to dying?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
A recurring Guardian Q&A prompt asked directly across respondents and years.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
I was in a car crash when I was 16, and I have a little scar on my face from smashing the passenger window with my head. If the car had rolled, I would have been dead.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 23 February 2019 source ↗
It is a very rare affliction. A GP would expect to meet it once in a career and this form of brain cancer is unpredictable and dangerous. Usually, this tumour might give you only a two-year span since its discovery. I have had two operations and one course of radiotherapy and now three chemotherapies (one currently starting). My death is, in a sense, imminent. I say to myself: I am dying. Something in my head is hurrying to kill me.
Maybe the night we drove a Hummer in Kabul and went to a cafe that Osama bin Laden supposedly used to frequent.
Making Apocalypse Now. I had a close call with a heart ailment due to anxiety, fear and physical abuse: I was not taking care of myself.
During my severe clinical depression in 2016. I was at Piccadilly station in Manchester and a train was coming.
On my wedding day in Oxfordshire, six years ago.
I’d change my mindset and not be so hard on myself, and impart the knowledge that other people’s intentions aren’t always as well-meaning as my own.
Being a decent person.
Scraping plates in a fish and chip cafe in Whitby.
An actor – that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. I went to stage school when I was 13.
Kind, fun and that I cared.
Nicola Walker, Peter Capaldi, Tom Ellis, David Jason, Rory Kinnear, Liev Schreiber
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