I was the PE technician at my old secondary school, so I had to pump up all the balls, wash all the kits and get the form notes in before morning registration every day.
What is the worst job you have done?
Question
What single thing would improve the quality of your life?
Daily life
Question
If you could edit your past, what would you change?
Failure & regret
Question
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Craft & work
Question
When were you happiest?
Time & hindsight
Question
What keeps you awake at night?
Daily life
Question
Who most deserves an apology from you, and why?
Failure & regret
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
The Guardian's long-running Q&A repeatedly asks this standing question, with minor tense variation.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Hop-picking in Kent when I was 13. The smell was dreadful, and put me off beer for life.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 14 September 2019 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 231 →I didn’t enjoy a bar job and glass collecting – people could be really rude.
Elaine Paige
English singer and actress
Maybe That’s Your Problem, a musical about premature ejaculation. It closed after only 18 performances.
Martin Freeman
English actor
The Wimpy in Kingston when I was 16. I’d recently become vegetarian, and there weren’t many veggie burgers in 1988.
More from Katharine Hamnett
View profile →A hydrogen-powered private jet for me and my dog. We’d be zero carbon dioxide emissions, so could go anywhere we liked.
Boarding school. It was horrible.
Raising awareness of ethical and environmental issues in the clothing industry. I think I was the original whistleblower within fashion.
Camping with my parents in the south of France. We went every year with the beautiful bell tent they made on a sewing machine. We even had a lavatory tent which was fabulous except, one day, it blew away with my father in it.
Threat of nuclear war, Iran/US situation, Syria, everything. I take sleeping pills.
To my parents, for being such a bitch.
More on craft & work
- What do you consider your greatest achievement? 192 answers
- How do you know when a piece of work is finished? 69 answers
- What do you do when you feel creatively blocked or stuck? 68 answers
- How does a new work begin for you? 67 answers
- How much rewriting or revision do you do? 50 answers
- What is the part of your job that people would be surprised is most of your job? 45 answers
Also answered this
Douglas Stuart, Terence Conran, Angela Hartnett, Bobbi Brown, Julien Macdonald, Victoria Pendleton
Search the directory for somebody in particular.
Explore further
- All craft & work questions
- The The Q&A questionnaire — 25 questions from the same format
- Explore the archive — by field, age, era, and subject