Yes, we might have entertained fantasies about alternative lives as writers or musicians or artists, but failure – an almost certain outcome, in retrospect – would have been catastrophic, and to have taken that risk would have been the sort of folly only the exceptionally brave (or irredeemably strange) can contemplate: working-class families have no safety nets to cushion the fall of their crash-and-burn casualties.
~ Mike Chisholm / Idiotic Hat