IN my third year at primary school my teacher, Mrs Oliver, asked the class what we wanted to be when we grew up. Every girl, bar one, said they wanted to be a nurse or a ballet dancer, or in some particularly deluded cases, a nurse who strutted her stuff for the Royal Ballet between 12-hour night shifts dealing with vomit-spattered drunks in an over-worked, under-paid A&E department.

I, however, as I am sure you are not going to be astounded to learn, did not want to be a pirouetting Florence Nightingale. For reasons I now find completely unfathomable, I wanted to be a lorry driver.

Maybe it was pure bone idleness that prompted me to make this choice. I mean, nurses had to rush around a lot in bad shoes and silly hats like clowns at a not particularly fun party, where pass the bed pan replaced pass the parcel and pin the tail on the donkey took on a whole new meaning on the vasectomy ward.

And being a ballerina was even worse for someone like myself who, even at primary school, was somewhat energetically-challenged.

They had to tippy-toe about for hours on end before leaping six feet into the air from a standing start to escape the advances of a man with the aforementioned donkey's appendage shoved down the front of his tights.

But lorry drivers had it sussed. You see even as a seven-year-old I was world weary enough to appreciate a job that allowed you to sit on your bum all day. I have obviously come to realise since that lorry driving is a much more challenging career than that (grovel, grovel, please don't ignore me when I'm trying to fight my way on to the A64), but at the time it seemed like a perfect way to while away the hours, sitting in a comfy cab, David Cassidy cassette on full blast and a nodding dog for company.

I don't know though, maybe it was just the Yorkie bars.

Needless to say, I didn't become a lorry driver - although I do now have a job that allows me to sit on my bum all day eating chocolate - and I would hazard a guess that the vast majority of my classmates didn't become nurses, ballerinas or, in the case of the boys, Leeds United centre forwards.

It is rare that any of us actually go on to live our childhood dreams.

Most of us cast them aside as adulthood beckons, opting for more practical, secure and achievable goals and letting our dreams and innocent fantasies float off into the ether. Which is a shame really because life in "practical, secure and achievable" land can be about as exciting as a wet weekend with Ann Widdecombe.

This is why I have to take my hat off (the one with the "I luv trucking" logo) to Sally Argyle, the 23-year-old North Yorkshire woman who ran away from home to join the circus.

Now, not many of us would have given up a practical and secure job in PR to dangle upside down 25ft up in the air on a trapeze as a man on a motorbike rides along a high-wire directly above our heads.

It takes guts to do something as obviously dangerous as this for a living, but it takes even greater courage to make the decision to follow your dreams in the first place.

Sometimes, however, courage is not the decisive factor and recklessness becomes the driving force behind a blinding ambition.

I am sure the journalist Yvonne Ridley dreamed of becoming a frontline reporter when she was younger and, if she ever grows up, she might just make the grade. In the meantime, however, she should put her burqa disguise back in the dressing up box and consider instead whether her illegal entry into Afghanistan was an act of personal and professional courage or a reckless and irresponsible attempt at self-glorification.

Was it really worth the heartache it caused her parents, Allan and Joyce, and her daughter Daisy?

And what about the continuing heartache for the families of her two Afghan guides who were arrested at the same time and now face a serious fate, possibly the death penalty, because Ms Ridley wanted to take a picture of a donkey convoy carrying refugees?

Maybe it would have better for them all in the long run if, as a child, she had dreamed of becoming a lorry driver instead.