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 foreign correspondent.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 4 November 2023 source ↗
Anything and everything. I watched the Olympics and wanted to be an 800m runner. If I watched Inspector Morse, I wanted to be a pathologist.
A pearl diver in Japan.
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.
I wanted to play for Tottenham.
I’ve had a few hairy scrapes as a scuba diver.
I worked in a chicken factory in the Netherlands when I was 16.
I am mortified that we went into Afghanistan, promised to liberate the female population and, 20 years later, dumped them in a situation as bad, robbing girls of their futures.
A sense of the world being full of possibility and it being in their hands to make it a better one.
Both my grandmother and my mother got dementia. My grandmother has passed away. My mother is in a home. Dementia is my biggest fear because it robs you of the very thing that makes life special.
Reading a newspaper.
Shirley Ballas, Julia Ormond, Orlando Bloom, Julian Lloyd Webber, Kate Mosse, Olivia Williams
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