She's presumably perfectly happy being in charge of a leading European nation, but the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has revealed that she harboured childhood dreams of being a champion athlete.
There was, unfortunately, one problem – she wasn't very good.
That's the way it is with many children's imagined, or dreamed, future jobs.
When I was 10, I nurtured a secret ambition to one day become a professional footballer, despite the fact - obvious even to my young mind - that I lacked pretty much all the necessary physical gifts.
A quick straw poll of nearby colleagues came up with some fascinating childhood dreams, from the relatively common (a vet, an air hostess) to the less usual, including an opera singer and a chemical engineer (the latter because the respondent's uncle was one "and he had a really cool office").
What did you dream of becoming? And, more pertinently, what do you think other world leaders hankered after before they got diverted into politics?
