As a child, I was mad on the All Creatures Great and Small books and TV series. Thinking being a vet would be a great career, I tried to practise my techniques on my cat. Unfortunately, unlike my friend’s dog who was perfectly happy to be wrapped in bandages from head to tail and prescribed Smarties for medicinal purposes, my cat was made of sterner stuff. Any attempts to put his paw into a sling would be met with a firm claws-bared whack.
Then I became a teenager and realised that a vet’s life would be a lot harder than it appeared on the telly, especially without Tristan, with his jolly japes and drunken pranks to make it more fun, and getting up in the middle of a cold winter’s night to stick my hand up a sheep’s backside was not something that really appealed.
Instead I found a new obsession in music magazines such as NME, Kerrang! and Record Mirror. Yes, of course, Smash Hits too but that didn’t fit into my hip image so I didn’t carry that one around, waiting for strangers to notice and nod appreciatively, ‘Look, she reads NME. She’s so cool’.
I would wait impatiently for the next issue, eagerly stopping off on my way home from school to pick up my ordered copy, having previously completed and cut out the little subscription form – y’know, Dear Mr Newsagent, please reserve me a copy of Britain’s hottest pop mag – that means SMASH HITS – every fortnight until further notice from the next issue.
I mentioned doing this to my teenage daughter.
‘What, you went and handed in a form at Waitrose like a saddo?’
‘No, not Waitrose, a newsagent. A little shop that just sold newspapers and magazines and sweets. And it wasn’t sad.’
‘Why didn’t you just do an online subscription and get it delivered?’
‘Because, FOR THE MILLIONTH TIME, the internet didn’t exist.’
Muttered under breath as walking away: ‘Loser.’
Rushing home with my coveted mag, I would read it feverishly from cover to cover, devouring it as completely as the packet of Breakaways I had snuck up to my room. Ah, what joyful days before we learnt about healthy eating. Children today might have iPad’s and Play Stations but I’d never heard of saturated fat or bad carbohydrates and could munch guilt-free on endless Penguin bars or packets of Skips. That beats Instagram hands down.
Lying on my bed, gazing up at my poster of Simon le Bon Bon, I would fantasise about bands playing gigs in glamorous places like New York, Sydney or Milton Keynes. For some reason, I didn’t picture myself actually in a band. Instead my dream was to work as a music journalist: travelling the world, reviewing records (Daughter: ‘What’s a record?’ Me: ‘A round thing you would play to get music to come out. Like a big black CD’. Daughter: ‘CD???’), attending concerts and interviewing bands. Naturally, all the stars would all fall madly in love with me and try to win me, but I would be a free spirit who couldn’t be tamed by a mere rock god, and would be known for my beauty and mystery throughout the music world. I spent an inordinate amount of time getting this fantasy just right. It sure beat reading Silas Marner.
During Careers Week, I revealed this ambition to my form teacher, Miss Smith, (obviously leaving out the part about being worshipped by rock stars), hoping for some encouragement and assistance. Miss Smith had white hair that she’d started having shampooed and set twice a week in the 1950s and saw no reason to stop now, a different coloured twin-set for each day of the week, and (we were convinced) a sexual obsession with Shakespeare. This being a Monday, she was wearing the pastel blue combo, her hair freshly teased into a candy-floss helmet. Staring at me incredulously, her lip curled with contempt, she spat out, ‘A music journalist? YOU? Don’t be ridiculous. Of course you can’t do that.’
If this was some reverse psychology method of motivating me to reach my full potential, it didn’t work.
At the grammar school I attended, if you didn’t fall into the academic, jolly hockey sticks mould, they didn’t really know what to do with you. Except ask you to leave as soon as they possibly could. Information about courses, jobs and opportunities was a lot harder to find in the 1980s. A quick Google search in 2014 brings up hundreds of hits for music journalism, from NVQs and degree courses to level-entry jobs, internships and the best ways to break into the business. Compare that to the ‘Careers Section’ of my school library: half a shelf, tucked between Biology and Chemistry, with a few dusty university prospectuses and not much else.
Nowadays, if I were a 15 year old with music business ambitions who received poor advice from a teacher, I’d think, ‘Up yours, you ugly crone’, start a music blog (BarbedBands? Barb & the Bands?? You get the idea), review a few gigs, make an online music programme on Youtube before being discovered and getting my own MTV show, marrying Harry Styles and taking to the celeb lifestyle like Jesse Pinkman to meth.
However, back in 1985, lacking the foresight to invent the Internet and have all this available to me, I pretty much just gave up on my dream. I wasn’t someone who hung out with bands, writers or creative sorts and didn’t have the confidence or daring to just make things happen. My ‘guidance’ from my teacher left me pretty crushed and I went on to spectacularly fail my O levels and leave school at 16, spending several years travelling and working in a series of crappy jobs before finally going to uni at 24. (And getting a first. Suck it, teacher biatch.)
Sadly, by then I’d forgotten about my dream and opted to study business and marketing, then enter the corporate world – the complete antithesis of a rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle.
So, without sounding like a Degrassi Street after-school special, when my children say that they want to be an astronaut or an actress, I always tell them to go for it. It doesn’t even matter if they reach their dream or change their goals on the way. As long as they’re having fun and following a passion, not working in a Dilbert cubicle staring at a monitor for eight hours a day. Been there, my friends. Not fun. Although, in hindsight, having The Verve line You’re a slave to money then you die as my screen saver probably didn’t make it any better.
Ok, I’m off to finish editing my book so I never have to care about the WENUS*.
*Friends joke – please tell me you get it, or I’m not sure if we can still be friends…
I had to google that WENUS. Thank God for Youtube…!
What a great post. So many parallels with my own experience re. “career guidance”. No A-levels for me either, and I didn’t make it to Uni till I was 29. Sadly, today’s young people, despite copious information available to them, struggle to get any kind of job at all, which is a lot worse than what we had to put up with 😦
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So true, even without qualifications, I could walk out of a job in the morning and have another one by the evening! Maybe it really was better in the 80s???
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It was. Except for the fashion, for which it was the worst decade ever…!
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No way, I totally rocked in my rah-rah skirt and fingerless gloves with BIG permed hair and you can’t convince me otherwise.
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Actually, I quite liked my rah-rah skirt 😉
But those bloody shoulder pads!!!!!!
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Yeah, they were in everything, weren’t they?! Shirts, cardies, jumpers, overalls!! I think I even had a pair that you could attach in the unlikely event that you bought a blouse that didn’t have shoulder pads!!
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I wish I’d seen you. What a sight!! Only to be rivaled by the amazing “individual” ? look of your sometime later, to be husband. He didn’t wash too often either. all part of his appeal?
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It wasn’t very appealing when he didn’t wash his hair for eight weeks because it was supposed to ‘self clean’ – it didn’t!!
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Those were the days – hair!
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Ooooh the memories! Especially Miss Smith and her sexual obsession with Shakespeare!
And the NME! We were sooo cool.
But seriously I’m always so proud of you for getting a First! Even though you and I decided just before your results that only someone shagging the lecturer would get a first! Haha.
Off to Google Wenus now.
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I really can’t comment on how degrees are awarded…not since the tribunal!!
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Aw, that brought back so many memories! I get all of it even if your daughter doesn’t! Anything but the WENUS please 🙂
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Yeah, you wouldn’t want to throw your WENUS out of whack…
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That could be very dangerous 🙂
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Yes I think it’s the same for all women of that generation. My school presented 3 options: secretary, nurse or teacher. I often wonder why I was so compliant and just believed them when they told me that was it, but girls in those days just did.
Do I sound bitter? Well I am a bit.
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I guess we had fewer successful female role models so we just accepted the choices that were offered. Hopefully, girls nowadays have all the same same aspirations as boys (unless it’s to play for Man U…)
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Brought back so many memories! Apart from the WENUS comment! I have never seen an episode of ‘Friends’ if this is a reference! I have also never seen ‘Sex in the city’. I watch quality TV!!!
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Yes, I do regret missing out on the quality TV you watch: ‘I’m a Celebrity’ or ‘Embarrassing Bodies’ anyone???
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What a great post Barb! I sympathize with your career aspirations being squelched. Career counselors should be young and encouraging, yet I’ve never met one that was. Maybe that was just the era in which we were raised. My niece and nephew have so many more options open to them, and many of those options don’t have a thing to do with living a 9-5 life out of a Dlbert strip.
(Oh, the WENUS! I’m looking at the WENUS and I’m not happy. ) 🙂
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Well, let me tell you something…you will care about it, because I care about it! You got it? Good! 🙂
Yes, maybe there’s hope for the next generation!
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I think we would have made the ideal team at school. I wanted to be an actress (pantomime and musicales, not Degrassi High) and was told that acting “is not a real job, it’s a hobby”. I had a Spandau Ballet poster on the wall that I had to take down because I didn’t like them staring at me when I changed into my PJ’s. (Sad, I know).
Is this the book I was going to proof read before my world turned upside down in April and I forgot? (MM puts on bad blogging buddy hair shirt and hates herself to hell and back 😦 Hope it’s going well, and I want to know what a Wenus is now. Sounds dirty.)
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Sadly, the WENUS isn’t dirty…but you need to watch Friends to find out more 🙂
I’m sure we’d have made a great pair at school: great for us, possibly not so much for the teachers!!
Yep, this is the book. One chapter to really sort out, then up the excitement levels as much as I can before deciding what to do with it…
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I wanted to be a ballerina well into my mid-teens 🙂
The thing that really throws me in your lovely essay is that the young generation really does not know about the pre-digital world. I mean, I’m 33 and this is shocking to me, not even grasping the concept of “you can’t do this online because there is no online.”
What was the last generation to go through such a technological paradigm shift, when the changes were both massive and universally-relevant? Probably the 2nd industrial revolution, the world before/after electric power.
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Yes, the world has undergone a huge change in the last 15 years or so, hasn’t it? My generation has mainly embraced the new technology (using Facebook, ordering online etc) but that’s nothing compared to children and teenagers whose whole lives seem to be online and understand a bewildering range of (totally pointless) apps and social media sites. Then there’s the older generation like my dad, who proudly tells me he’s never sent a text or email and doesn’t intend to start now!
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Great post. I went to a school for girls (pronounced ghells) where you were supposed to become a teacher or a nurse, or a teacher. Or possibly a nurse.
We had hardly any access to information before the internet, did we, yet I was about to write exactly the same comment as Lady of the Cakes – that we stood good chances of getting good jobs whereas nowadays it’s become nightmarishly hard.
My son is even worse than your daughter, by the way. After I had explained that we didn’t have the internet when I was a child, nobody had computers at home and we listened to music on tapes, he said “Oh yes and you travelled in chariots with horses, didn’t you?” (he was being serious).
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Children are delightful for making you feel good, aren’t they? I remember thinking my secondary school teachers were all decrepit old codgers who should really be in nursing homes…I’m now older than most of them!
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Aah, you made me so nostalgic with your post… 🙂
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The 80s were great, weren’t they? I loved to go back…and give myself a good slap 😉
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I wasn’t overly impressed by the careers guidance at my school either – although in retrospect maybe it could have been worse. I was asked what I wanted to do when I left school, and then was given some literature about it. Maybe that would have been where I could have said ‘pop singer’ or ‘famous detective’ or something, but my problem was that I didn’t really know what I wanted to ‘be’, and I was hoping that I was going to be asked questions which would lead to suggestions for jobs that I might like.
Now, with the benefit of my mature years (eek!) I can say that ‘follow your dreams’ is definitely the way to go – as long as you have a dream of course, unlike me. 😉
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