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A barrister, a vet or a singer.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 16 July 2022 source ↗
The question
What did you want to be when you were growing up?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.
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Others on this question
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Vick Hope
British television and radio presenter
J-Lo, a foreign correspondent and, at uni, I assumed that someone would tap me on the shoulder and ask me to be in MI6, but it never happened.
Edmund Hillary
Mountaineer and explorer; first ascent of Everest, 1953
I really had no idea whatsoever. I feel that my life developed as I went along. I was never one of those people who, at an early age, had picked an objective and worked steadily towards it. All I knew was that I wanted to get involved in adventurous activity. I didn’t have any specific type of activity in mind, but I wanted to do things that were exciting and adventurous. I had a fairly diffused feeling as to what precisely it should be.
An actor. I watched a lot of TV because we lived in the countryside and the weather was so bad.
An air traffic controller.
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When I was 18, I bought a boat for a million pounds and sold it a year later for just over half the price.
The outcome of the Leveson inquiry.
Procrastination.
In the first lockdown. Obviously, there was terrible grief and sadness and fear around, but there was also this reclaiming for nature. I was constantly at my allotment with the big kids and my husband.
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