Chapter One

ambition

My best friend’s nine-year-old cousin can’t decide whether she wants to be an astronaut or Prime Minister. When I was young, I used to want to be either beautiful or a farmer’s wife. I couldn’t be both because if I was beautiful, then there was no way I would settle for just a farmer. I would be good enough for my very own sugar daddy. I knew what a sugar daddy was before I had heard of an engineer or a chartered surveyor.

-See also Attitude; Bosses; Colin; Firefighting; Promotion; Ultimatum

ants

I was sitting in the park during my lunch hour when an ant crawled over my leg. I squashed it with my thumb and flicked off its body with my fingers. Then I carried on eating my sandwiches.

Ants have not always left me so cold. I must have been about eleven when I found an ant colony in our garden. You have never seen anything so marvelous. It was like watching algebra in action. The worker ants walked in straight lines everywhere and seemed to know exactly where they were going.

But then I remembered something I’d learned at school and drew a line with my black felt-tip right across their path. It threw them into confusion. They wouldn’t cross it even though it was just a drawing.

I told my father this at lunchtime. He said that we should respect ants for their innate civilization. They even milk aphids, he said, in the same way we milk cows. He went on and on about how clever ants were in a way he never talked about me.

After lunch, I boiled a kettle and poured the hot water over the colony. I sat there and watched the ants die. My eyes hurt from squeezing them together to make the tears com