If money didn’t come into the equation and if I was reasonably fit not standing my age, there are three things I would opt for doing in a job or occupational sense.

I would like to be a person involved in cleaning out stormwater drains around schools and public buildings. This was something I used to do when the principal of Nhulunbuy Primary School and it was good weekend work.

The second thing that I would most like to do would be to be a shiner of shoes setting up a little stool footrest and a seat for the customer. I would clean polish and buff shoes and have great conversations with the people whom I was serving.

The third thing I would like to be as a cleaner of streets in Dublin, Ireland. Many years ago when visiting I went out for an early morning walk and had a terrific conversation with a street cleaner during that conversation learned a lot about the city and what made a tick from the viewpoint of a street cleaner.

The thing that each of these three jobs have in common is that people performing them are generally unobtrusive and blend into the background of the environment in which they work I left pretty well alone and have great opportunities to observe and to learn about the characters of others they see passing by. Because of the anonymity of these professions, a great deal of understanding becomes possible because the job operators are not hassled or interfered with.

So these are the three things that I would like to do.