What did/do your parents do for a living?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

In reality though actually what my parents do is hard to explain.

That means they're spies.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Dad's an electrician and Mum runs a bookshop. In both cases this is since the early/mid 1970s. Dad was also a youth worker for the local council (now there's a job from another - better - era in local government) for a time in the 70s. Dad's sister is a retired nurse, while his brother is a retired blood specialist of some kind (on the technical side). Mum's brother is an artist who has occasionally been employed as an art teacher.

My paternal grandfather worked a bewildering range of jobs, including in a tailors (or was it a drapers shop?) in the East End, as an egg salesman, as an upland smallholder and as an accountant (for a poultry company. He might have done other stuff there, I forget. I do know that he never ate chicken). But he was mostly one of those strange professional-in-all-but-actuality amateur musicians (as a highly skilled church organist and a well-regarded chamber choir conductor). His father was a rockman (i.e. a blaster) in a slate quarry. My paternal grandmother mostly worked in retail, most notably at a wool shop. She also knitted with a frighteningly high level of skill (particularly very complex jumpers. I can't remember whether she ever knitted for sale or not). Her father was gassed in the First World War and as a result worked a desk job for Monmouthshire County Council. My paternal grandfather was a teacher (secondary modern) and horticulturist. He also played football to a decent standard when young (happily deciding against playing professionally) and basically was junior football coaching in Shropshire for a while. His father was a coal miner (and his union paid for his son's teaching qualifications). My paternal grandmother was also a teacher, though of a different sort: she ran a village school for decades, spending most of this time (eventually unsuccessfully, alas) trying to prevent its closure. Her father was a hilariously sketchy grocer with tragicomic delusions of grandeur and her mother a sort of Methodist Granny Weatherwax.