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 had a gun shoved in my eyeball in New York by a crack dealer in the 1980s. I have also watched somebody next to me get shot in the head in a gun battle – that was in Jamaica in the early 1990s.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 5 August 2017 source ↗
Undiagnosed VIPoma in 2018.
On a flight between Beijing and London with Team GB divers. There was a fire on the plane. We landed on a long-abandoned strip in Siberia. Two days later, the same flight attendants told us we had beaten the odds by surviving.
On a plane with Meryl Streep in 1984: the engines blew and we had to make an emergency landing.
Coming under attack while reporting in Iraq.
When I was 15 and starting my first job as a messenger boy at the post office, delivering telegrams.
The 12 years I spent in receivership. That was me being a dick. I lost the court case when I wanted to sack my management and had to pay them £120,000. I said, “I am not paying you, because I should have won.”
In 1975, I watched the film Stardust, and Adam Faith said, “I supply the birds, the pills and the pot.” And I thought, “I want that.”
One Nation Under a Groove, by Funkadelic.
Kate Nash, Craig David, Martin Kemp, Sue Perkins, Alison Moyet, Emma Bunton
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