What did you want to be when you grew up?

I can’t really remember having any fixed idea about what I wanted to do when I grew up. My friends and I played teachers, doctors and nurses and mummies and daddies obviously! I think probably being a teacher scored pretty highly, at least until I grew up enough to discover that teachers are just big whining kids who have never left school in their lives and have no idea what living in the real world entails.

I know I wanted to be a mummy – I know that sounds completely lacking in ambition! But I was only small!

When I was older and choosing where to go to university I decided that what I really wanted to do was to become an interpreter. I hated every minute of university. To be fair, maybe it was the course. I should have accepted the offer from St Andrews, which would not have meant doing awful courses like economics, accounts and business studies. That was just a straight French degree. But it’s easy to say in hindsight. If I had completed my degree my French would not have been any better than it is now – I could speak it before I moved to France, and can speak it much better now, and have a much larger vocabulary. A degree could not have improved on practical usage.

So what do I want to do with the rest of my life now?

I’m damned if I know!