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.
A missionary in Africa – I think that was Sunday school-based.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 20 December 2025 source ↗
At the end he asked me if I would like to go into the Army. I thought it would be splendid to command an Army, so I said 'Yes' at once: and immediately I was taken at my word. ... I was told later that he had only come to the conclusion that I was not clever enough to go to the Bar. However that may be, the toy soldiers turned the current of my life.
I dreamed of being an artistic skater. And a nursery nurse.
When I was about 14 and got my first drum kit, I wanted to be a drummer in a band like the Police.
Prime minister and brain surgeon.
You are good enough.
Laziness, lack of empathy, lack of humour.
A glow of wellbeing.
Magician’s assistant on a cruise ship for two weeks when I was 19. When I was meant to be being levitated, I was silently crying while pretending to be unconscious as I hung limply off a metal pole. It was bleak.
Years ago, I was trying to get with one of the big agencies and I cobbled together a VHS tape of me in adverts and sobbing in The Bill, and took it United Agents for the attention of Dallas Smith. A week later I went back and said, “Has she looked at the tape?” And they were, like, “Dallas is a he, no he hasn’t and he doesn’t want to,” and handed it back to me.
Very impatient, bossy, always late.
Serena Williams, Salman Rushdie, Daphne Guinness, Chris Hoy, Paul O'Grady, Busta Rhymes
Search the directory for somebody in particular.