My gramps always used to tell me that if daydreams were worth having they should be big ones. I can still hear him saying dream big, lass whenever the six-year-old me outlined her plans to become a famous gymnast, or a ballerina. Looking back, the adult me would prefer to think that that was the mantra by which he lived his life, and not something he said because I was a rotund child with no athletic prowess whatsoever. I’ve got to be honest, even at such a tender age ‘ballerina’ was not an obvious career choice.

Like all little girls, I wanted to be a princess, and if that didn’t work out my fallback position was just something which allowed me to be sparkly. Thing is, little fat girls tended not to get picked to do princessy sparkly things. Even my mum failed to spot my potential to carry off powder pink, I have photographic proof that when my childhood next door neighbour had a fancy dress party to celebrate his seventh birthday, I went as a cowboy. Not much call for sparkles on that costume.

At infant school I was in six-year-old awe of one of the girls in my class…I actually wanted to be her. She was tiny, with smooth shiny blonde hair, and she was so pretty. She was the one who got to play Mary in the nativity play, looking all delicate and Mary-like, and cuddling a tiny tears doll swaddled in a tea towel. I think that was the year I had a non-speaking part as goat three on the back row, and that’s just kind of how it was.

I thought my big break had come at senior school when, aged 14 I was picked to play the lead role in the school’s production of Iolanthe. I was not your typical leading lady, I give you that. However, despite being fat I could sing, and I think all those years of not getting picked for shit meant that they’d run out of excuses. I was in. I was going to play a fairy.

It would have been awesome, if the music teacher who produced it hadn’t been one sandwich short of a picnic…she wanted it to be a bit edgy. So in her version of Iolanthe, the heroine hadn’t in fact been banished from fairyland to a land far far away, for the last few years she’d been hiding at the bottom of a swamp. WTF?

My big entrance saw me entering stage left covered in weeds made from green crepe paper, singing my big solo whilst pulling a frog on wheels. Bitch. It took me years to live down the embarrassment, and strangely enough, Hollywood didn’t come calling. Their loss, right? And still, no sparkles.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m no longer harbouring any desire to get my kit off and pirouette around a stage…I still dream big though, and I always will. The world may have missed it’s opportunity to see me in a tutu, but I’ll still make my mark on this world one way or another. And when I do, I don’t care that I’m fifty with deflating chins…I’m having sparkles 🙂

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