94. The wrong life?

Sunday was mother's day so I phoned my mother.  She was full of admiration for Contact Magazine (I'd sent her the pdf link) and musingly commented that my teachers at school wanted me to do journalism.

This was news to me.  Nobody ever told me I could write.  Or that I could do anything. Or that there was such a thing as a career in journalism.  I was a wimpish, introverted and unattractive teenager.  Confidence was something that other people had, rendering me even more prickly and useless, and my crap school records (including english) meant teachers just weren't interested.  Once my mother had decided to employ her considerable talents to get me into farming it never occurred to anybody, including her, to ask me what I might like to do, or tell me that there were choices.

My mother will tell you that it was my decision to do farming.  Well.  At 14, fed up of her pestering me about what I wanted to do when I grew up, and inspired by a TV programme about kids galloping their ponies round a sheep farm in the Australian outback, I said "I want to be a sheep farmer in Australia".

Oh but wouldn't I have loved to be a writer!  My attic is full of the diaries I have written since the age of 13 but I never had the confidence to take the plunge and turn it into a career.

Don't get me wrong.  I have had my moments (and fully intend to have quite a few more) and love farming, and have done some wonderful things that wouldn't have happened had I been living another life, and have the best friends in the world to help me enjoy this path that is my life.  And I have achieved contentment - I'll stick with that!