The question
As a child, what career or life did you imagine for yourself?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
This is a standing question in The Guardian's decades-long The Q&A and also recurs independently in career and life interviews.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
I wanted to be a doctor, like my father.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 19 July 2025 source ↗
More successful with girls.
I wanted to be a footballer at first, like any other Neapolitan kid.
A comedian, and I may have achieved that.
I wanted to be a footballer and then a squash player – I was in with a chance because I was very good. But I fell out of love with that by 14 or 15 and joined a youth theatre.
Every time I got a lucrative voiceover, I bought a picture. The most expensive was by James Gillray.
Facebook and the need to pee.
On tour during Christmas vacation at Cambridge with its European Theatre Group, playing Shakespeare. I knew it was the best time of my life.
To experience the utter powerlessness of locked-in syndrome.
To my mother for disappointing her. Mummy wanted me to be a different sort of person from who I am, but one can’t change oneself.
Becoming doubly incontinent.
Terry O'Neill, Pauline McLynn, Bozoma Saint John, Adam Clayton, James Dyson, Julie Andrews
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