| Posted by Lou | The time is 11.52am here in London UK |
Today is a suggested topic from Bel:
What I Wanted To Be When I Grew Up When I Was Little
(That syntax makes my brain hurt (in a good way (sort of like how a series of brackets does (like these ones))).)
A Pikelet Maker
Fluffy, golden, smothered in jam and cream. Perfection.
When I was growing up we would go visit Grandma and Granddad on The Farm (of which you have seen the last remaining remnant of the family homestead in this post), often stopping at The Winton Bakery to pick up Joy Boys [aka The Taste of Childhood] and other delights. I would climb up on the ledge and gaze adoringly at the baked goods, therein planting the seeds of a lifetime appreciate of the art of baking.
This is not a Joy Boy, but the closest I could find. (NB: never google
image search "joy boy". Especially not at work.) A Joy Boy is two
little round lamingtons (not a bigger one cut in half as above),
sandwiched around The Winton Bakery's version of clotted cream
(sweet and surely laden with crack judging by its addictive nature).
The pikelet maker part came specifically from the extreme fun of making pikelets with Grandma. I have absolutely no idea whether this was a frequent experience or something we did once or twice [like making plastic bag kites that we stuck out the windows of the car on the way to the tip as we all sang "to the dump! to the dump! to the dump!"] as it is one of my very earliest precious shreds of memory (I think we are talking age 4 or thereabouts). But I do specifically recall making pikelets on a huge old fashioned gridle [oh what I would do to have that gridle now!] out front of the house, something I was never quite able to figure out in later years as I'm not exactly sure what was heating it.
Whereever, however, the fact is that I retain a great fondness for pikelets and must have picked up a bit of skill as I am still a dab hand and making them and their European and American siblings.
The Corporate/ Lawyer/ Sociologist/ Geographer
There was then a phase in my teens when I made my first became aware of the gender inequality within society and made my first attempts at grasping feminism. This involved a misguided conviction that girl power meant beating the boys at their own game, and thus I envisioned myself as some corporate high-flyer perhaps resembling this:
The social conscience then set in and the dream became of being a crusader for justice: Louise the Defence Lawyer, fighting for those wrongly accused of murder. The social conscience blended with an interest in society and I toyed with sociology and geography, eventually going to university to do a double degree in law and social sciences. During Law School the reality hit that being a Lawyer involves years of tedious research and minutiae of detail, and being a Defence Lawyer primarily involves Bad Guys. (How could I defend a rapist?) And as Introduction to Sociology was a waste of time and money I dropped out of both, shifting instead to Management School.
At which point the TV2s Awards launched and I returned to one of my more fundamental dreams...
The Filmmaker
At school I used to come up with ideas for short films and mini screen vignettes (I believe I had read something about "Z Spots" - 60 second films). They were usually based on a witty-one-liner style of story-telling (something I now hate when I see it in funded short films as it is such a fundamentally amateur and unsophisticated form).
So a couple of successful entries in the TV2s Awards later and I learned that this could actually be a career option and stuffed my Management Degree into the bottom of my suitcase, moving to Wellington to seek my way in the world of film...
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