I’ve been thinking about youthful ambitions recently. This is because I found a list I drew up when I was 15 of all the things I hoped to achieve in my life. In fact, it’s quite a modest list. I have no aspirations to broker world peace, become a titan of industry or cure infectious diseases. Fame and fortune don’t feature. In theory, when you’re 15 anything is possible, but my hopes for the future were short on ambition, but long on fancy. Nevertheless, my success rate is abysmal.
There are 11 goals in total and, if I’m being generous, I’ve managed 3½. A spectacular failure by anyone’s standards. Still, there are some unusual ambitions. Can you believe that sky diving is on the list? Going up in a balloon is the closest I’ve managed and that’s really the opposite when you think about it. Getting an English sheepdog? What was I thinking? My family has always had cats and I wouldn’t have a clue what to do with such a large creature about the house. Our last cat, the lovely Jasper, was big and furry, so maybe he was the feline version of a sheepdog. Only better.
I have achieved some of my goals, though. Number one was to “be educated”. And, arguably, I have been. Number two was to earn Cdn$20,000 a year and I did achieve that. Always a practical girl, but things grew increasingly fanciful after that. To have strawberry blonde hair was one of my odder ambitions and would be quite a departure from my current grey. Still, not impossible. Another was to read the complete works of Shakespeare and Dickens. I think that reading Shakespeare is probably the wrong approach altogether – surely watching his plays is preferable. Fortunately, I absolved myself from all Shakespearean plays in any form a few years ago and therefore can happily draw a thick black line through that one. I do quite like his sonnets though.
Dickens is another story, so to speak. There are still some of his books I haven’t read and over the past few years I’ve been filling in the gaps. I read Bleak House a year or two ago and A Christmas Carol last December. I have just started Hard Times and after that there won’t be many left to read. I am a big Dickens fan, so then I’ll be forced to start re-reading. Little Dorrit, although not a popular choice, is one of my favourites. Perhaps because it is both tragic and very funny, and also gives me an excuse to lurk in Southwark, south London. There you can find remnants of the Marshalsea debtors’ prison, where little Dorrit and her feckless father were forced to live, and then visit St George the Martyr Church to look for her portrait tucked into a corner of a stained-glass window. Then it’s off to Borough Market, in theory to admire the halls built around the time Little Dorrit was written, but in practice to buy a delicious lunch from one of the stalls. My love of Dickens and London are intertwined.
All this has made me realise that at 15, it never occurred to me that I’d leave Canada, where I had lived for only 6 years, and move back to England. It also never occurred to me that I’d find that list of ambitions so many years later that I’d need reading glasses to make them out. What did I know?