What will you spend 150,000 hours doing? Something fun, I hope?

Sometimes, I've often looked at a mushroom and thought a little too hard about how it came to be sitting on my chopping board. For the moment, we'll overlook why I'd bother thinking about mushrooms instead of simply eating them. What I mean by this, is that they must have been cut by someone from wherever mushrooms grow, and then packaged. It's this person whom I think about. I mean, most people will tell you (while they're still young enough not to be dragged into that realm of scepticism and mis-trust that we call "being grown up") they want to be a fireman/doctor/lawyer/policeman. One of my friends actually wanted to be a bus. No, not a bus driver, or anyone who works on or in a bus. I mean, she wanted to actually be a bus. I know, right? Anyway, that aside, the person who cut my mushroom must've had these dreams about what they'll do as a dream job when they were younger. And now they're cutting mushrooms. What happened to the dream?

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People's dignity: cheaper by the day, it seems.

So there I was, in the queue at a shop in Cambridge to buy a pair of shoes, as you do, and I can see him at the end. He's wearing the kind of cringe-worthy blazer that someone dons when they've just proudly bought a boat, and insist on calling everyone "skipper". He had a straw-woven hat that matched the awful ensemble that he was sporting, and had a John Thompson-esque goatee. His wife was next to him, with that "sun-kissed" skin that could only remind me of a ten year old sofa. I don't like making snap judgements about people I've never met, but I couldn't shift the belief that these two are the kind of folks who are full to the brim of their own pompous opinions, and take great enjoyment in broadcasting them to everyone.



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