The question
What is the harshest thing anyone has said to you?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
A fixed Guardian Q&A prompt asked directly across respondents and years.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
When the surgeon told me I wouldn’t be able to play the cello again, in 2013. I have a herniated disc and it’s pressing on a nerve in my neck. I announced I was stopping playing in 2014. I absolutely did not want to stop.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 15 July 2023 source ↗
“You’re a reasonably intelligent girl,” by a teacher, and it drove me crazy and made me want to get into Oxford.
A fellow artist called me a flaneur!
It happened when I was younger, somewhere outside London. We were on bikes, and this older girl pulled up and said something racist that I won’t repeat. I will never forget that, because it was the first time, and I was like, “Oh, I am feeling different from everyone around me right now”.
A review of Phèdre said – because I was quite large at the time – Toby Stephens’s Hippolytus needs to get on a StairMaster.
A detective, a train driver on the underground and Leyton Orient’s centre forward.
Frightening, exhilarating and all-consuming.
My cello. At the time, in 1983, it was £192,500.
When I was 16, I’d just won full scholarships to both the Royal Academy and the Royal College of Music, and felt like the world was my oyster.
Twice I should have died in car accidents when both my cars were written off. I was completely unhurt; the cello was completely unhurt, too. A complete miracle.
Our beautiful cat was so ill that we were hours away from having her put down. Somehow, we’ve managed to nurse her back to full health again.
Chiwetel Ejiofor, Isabel Allende, Stephanie Beacham, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Katie Melua, Roger McGough
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