Recently I found myself sitting next to a delightful Dutchman at a lovely family wedding. We exchanged basic information on who we knew, how beautiful the bride looked (his niece), how handsome the groom was (my cousin), and what a touching, modern and uplifting exchange of vows we had just witnessed, then we turned to introduce ourselves to the people on our other sides. Later, as we tucked into homemade lasagne (made by the mother of the groom) I asked him a question I must have asked a thousand times, 'what do you do?' He looked momentarily confused as if his understanding of English had failed him, 'What do you mean?' he replied, 'do you mean, what do I like to do?' It suddenly struck me how rigid we are in our thinking in the UK, how we allow ourselves to be entirely defined by our work and our jobs and how this has become our narrow culture. Of course I was asking about his job, but he heard a different question. He was thinking about his life as a whole, his love of the outdoors, his hobbies and family time and he started with that and then he told me about his job which is only a part of his life, not the whole of it. There is such a lesson there and I made my own vow that day to look at my life and all the parts of myself with new eyes and greater value, I'm not defined by my work, I am so much more, we all are. And the next time someone asks me what I do I will talk about my life in a different way and try not to package myself into one little box labelled 'work'.