Making a wild guess based on thirty seconds of thought as I sit here fingers poised over keyboard, I would say that for every year past twenty years of life, your recollections of childhood become narrowed to the photographs you have of that time and the infamous stories you are repeatedly told by family. To the point you eventually stop thinking about what your childhood was and just puzzle over the validity of those memories. Well that's me anyway. Very occasionally you read or hear something that jumps you right back into your childhood memories, the real ones.
Which is how my childhood memories of career aspirations came to be knocked loose a few days ago. Dusting them off, I took the time to revisit them for the first time in a very long time. Of course they were not career aspirations at the age of eight, they were what you wanted to be when you grew up.
Six Million Dollar Man
Steve Austin aka The Six Million Dollar Man, a man rebuilt with modern technology (circa 1975). Half human and half bionic, he could see like you wouldn't believe, ran really really fast and had a right arm that could punch holes in walls. I so desperately wanted to be like him, especially as I was quite ill as a child. So much so I spent quite some time considering accidents I could have that would necessitate someone rebuilding me. I knew having an accident like Steve Austin was off the cards at least for a few years because he was an astronaut.
Astronaut
Desperately wanted to be one of these for all the reasons stated above.
Deep Sea Diver
I used to be fascinated by books and pictures that showed a single scuba diver deep, deep in the ocean, surrounded on all sides by endless clear water. It is a concept that still echoes today with a fascination for models (plastic figurines) that depict characters suspended in the air. I have no idea why.
A member of the Famous Five
At the age of five I learned to read but very quickly forgot again because nobody gave me anything interesting to read. At the age of nine and approaching the summer holidays I still could not read. Placed in remedial my teacher recommended my parents take me to the library and hire a famous five book. I do not remember which of the twenty one books it was but it did spend all summer beside my bed unread. Out of abject boredom in bed one night I picked it up. I knew words because I spoke English but I did not recognise them on the page. I did know the alphabet though so I worked phonetically. It was brilliant. Not only was I learning to read again but this amazing story was unfolding in my mind. Addicted by this wonderful world that I held in my hands, all twenty one books were finished by October, at which point I started on Jaws (which had just come out at the cinema and I was not allowed to see), which I might have convinced the woman in the library was for my dad. I have seldom been without a book since that time.
Looking back at the characters, it is interesting that even then I was in awe of Julian, a little besotted with Anne and wanted to be just like Dick. I might even have become him, I wonder how much of these things do shape our unconscious intention as children?
Caine aka Kung Fu
I really wanted to be like David Carradine when I grew up. His Caine character in the Kung Fu series fed this child mind week over week, I loved it. I remember sitting cross legged on the floor on Saturday nights as the theme tune started up and Carradine climbed some random sand dune with that almost dance like effortlessness he possessed through all his life. Me and my friends used to replicate the scene at the beginning where he dodges spears by throwing practically anything we could lay our hands on at each other, which seldom ended well. When I got older I studied Aikido and Tae Kwon Do and for while I did achieve a kind of grace. But then I discovered girls and alcohol and wanted entirely different things.
Superman
I appreciate that Superman is not indigenous to earth which is why he has super powers and therefore was never going to be him, but it was not really his super powers I was interested in. Lets face it, what's the point of being able to deflect bullets with your chest, melt ice with your eyes (my wife can turn stuff to ice with her eyes and she's from earth, I think) and fly faster than the speed of light and time, if a little bit of green rock incapacitates you. What I did want though was Lois Lane, without ever really knowing why. I just yearned for her and simply saw being Superman as a conduit to achieving that.
Angels
For the life of me I have no idea where this came from, or what the Genesis of this was. I have always wanted to be an angel and still do, to the point there is barely a fictional story I write that does not contain a thinly veiled angel somewhere. My dream would be to write the books about angels I have long dreamed of writing (I haven't as angels are not currently commercial). Nor by the way would these angels by the temperamental sort you find in the bible or the imp like ones you find in a lot of fairy art. My angels are beautiful (men and women), vengeful, redemptive, very powerful and bloody big. I think it might come from a frustration of being a child, of being ill so much, being intensely frustrated by the whole child parent experience and wanting to be free. Flying might also have been a factor.
Adam Ant
This one from when I was a little older. Mostly because he looked really cool with a white stripe painted across his face and lots of girls liked him a lot. Or appeared to. I wanted some of that.
Programmer
I was sixteen in 1983. On that birthday I had forty pound which was destined for new gears for my racing bike. Between me and the bike shop was Boots and in the window was a small black and rather sleek looking device called a computer. I never made it to the bike shop. I went though every page of the computers manual that night and very soon after decided I wanted to be a programmer. Which I achieved a few years later, setting this life on its current course, despite the road deviating wildly at times and often running circuitous routes.
Jack Reacher
Not having been a child now for twenty four years does not mean I do not dream and aspire. What would be the point of life if you could not? As such I would very much like to invent a fictional character as charasmatic as Lee Child's Jack Reacher and have the subsequent number of bestsellers Child has achieved with that character. Of cause mine would also have to be an Angel...
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