Bloganuary #22

What was your dream job as a child?

Well I am assuming that the definition of “a child” is younger than mid – late teens. In which case this will be a very short post!

When I was “a child” the idea of a job never really entered my head – I was just having too much fun playing around at all sorts of different things with differing levels of success. I tried ballet, but that didn’t last long as I was too tall and to me it just ended up as skipping around. I tried tap-dancing, which I enjoyed because it made lots of noise. I played various recorders and the trumpet for much the same reason and I played lots of different sports, because they were fun. I was a bit of a “tom-boy” and enjoyed nothing more than climbing trees, sploshing around in a shallow river (near our house) building stone circles in which to catch tiny fish, building models of spaceships & lots of other things using leftover toilet roll middles, plastic caps etc., but I was lucky enough I guess to never think about “a job”. My childhood was just filled with having fun.

Only once I had started secondary school and found that I enjoyed science and maths (and was good at it), did I finally (at about age 15 – 18) start to think about careers in science and finally engineering. So really, I never had a dream job as a child – I was lucky enough that I didn’t need to work and therefore never really thought about jobs. Perhaps that is why I am fortunate enough to only have to do work that I enjoy.

Quick postscript here: My mother was a chemistry teacher and from a very early age I was playing games with filter paper (chromatography I later discovered), books of pH paper and using a pestle and mortar to test the acidity of all sorts of items from crushed berries to cooking ingredients like vinegar and bicarbonate of soda. Also, as my mother was predominantly working in secondary schools there were many times when I was not feeling very well when I ended up in the annex to the chemistry classroom playing with light boxes, prisms and so forth. However, to me this was just games and fun.