Did you play this game with prune stones at the end of school lunch, once you had freed the prunes from lumpy school custard, served in grooved proto-Tupperware jugs? Being a librarian excites me and interests me, as it always has, but I must face the humbling truth that I am not very good at it; or, more exactly, I cannot convince any potential employer that I'm any good at it. Therefore I found myself at the Next Step skills health check, looking for alternative careers.
I must explain at this point that, whatever career I thought I might be cut out for, running pony treks was not one of them. I toyed as a boy with priest and soldier; I did fancy myself as a don, allowed to walk across the grass of Cambridge colleges, but that's what being brought up in that city does to you.
The hereditary principle is a fine thing, if you want to be governed by half-witted haemophiliacs, but less useful for careers guidance. I never yielded to its pressures and turn to doctoring; though my father, and many generations before him, were Cambridge physicians, and, being adopted, I also discovered that my natural father was a doctor, and quite a distinguished one too, I could not believe I'd have been any good. I suppose I would not have killed many patients on purpose; perhaps that is what 'to do no harm' means, and not every doctor can make that claim.
Careers advice at school was dispensed by a chemistry master. He had a reputation for recommending metallurgy to everyone, regardless of their talents or natural bent, but he never recommended it to me.
So what did the Next Step site tell me? After some tests, it proclaimed me to be suited for the following:
- Practice Nurse: why?
- Fitness Instructor: come off it. For all my running, the last thing I can do is to yell bossy instructions at anyone else.
- Personal Trainer: see above
- Lifeguard: you jest
- Riding Holiday Leader: again, the equestrian theme. I've been on top of horses, and even stayed in the saddle for a few minutes, but I would not claim any skills or knowledge.
- Catering or Restaurant Manager: now, would you eat at a restaurant I managed?
- Food Scientist-Food Technologist: think first, what is my attitude to the sell-by dates of food in the fridge?
- Consumer Scientist: I have no idea what this means
- Kitchen Assistant: come, come, what would Elizabeth David say?
- Waiting Staff: no, I could not bring myself to grimace at a table and ask, 'is everything all right for you?'
- Baker: perhaps, if I could make pies in the tradition of Mrs Lovett
- Set Designer: have you ever seen me try to make anything?
- Photographic Stylist: I refer you to my Flickr photos
- Prop Maker: as above, absence of any DIY skills rules me out
- Computer Games Tester: I despise computer games. I know this is remiss of me, but I don't care
- Web Content Manager: yes, I've been doing this for years, but you try convincing the half-wits who recruit to these sorts of posts that a librarian could be any use
- Pop Musician: at last, a sensible suggestion
- NVQ Assessor: oh the irony. I was trying to recruit one of these in my last but one job
- Art Gallery Curator: well, yes, but since one of my oldest and dearest friends, a curator, has just been sacked by an organisation that thinks, as do they all in Cameron and Clegg's Britain, that public museums are unnecessary, it seems unlikely I could do anything useful here
- Education Welfare Officer: why?
- School Matron: er...
- Community Education Co-ordinator: yawn
- Training Manager: God!