Happy Birthday Claire!

Tonight* we celebrated Claire's birthday at Plan B, a club in the (notorious) London suburb of Brixton. (Adding the words “the” and "riots" to “Brixton” may jog your memory.) Claire is a colleague of mine, a speech therapist, who until last week was working at the site I'm based at... She's just been seconded to our main campus for the next twelve weeks, and is the person mentioned in passing in last Saturday's episode. Well, we had an exellent time tonight... I'm enjoying getting to know some of my workmates better. It's cool to be working in a place where there are people of a similar age and stage to me; quite different from my previous jobs. Tonight we must have been the first to leave, catching the last tube home around midnight. It was a balance of me feeling like we were leaving too soon, and Bronwyn feeling that our eventual crash into bed at 1:40am was too late for her... Our different sleep/wake cycles sometimes present a challenge. It's true that Bronwyn's never been good with late or short nights, but I should confess my unfair advantage that I can get up over an hour later than her every day if I choose. It may be time to re-jig our evening timetable so she gets more sleep in the week. If it means I consistently start waking at 6am, I guess I'll just be able to send a few emails before going to work...

A conversation I had with birthday-girl Claire last night got me thinking. I was asking how she'd decided to become a Speech Therapist; she asked me why I hadn't. I'd never really even heard of Speech Therapy when I was making formative decisions. I wonder now how people become lots of those unusual professions. Everyone knows “butcher, baker, candlestick maker", but “apiarist, arborist, phlebotomy technician” just doesn't roll off the mind so easily. I seem to actively make so few significant decisions in my life, and so wonder, how do people drift into these jobs?