Speech Therapist

As evidenced by the extraordinary success of monarchy-fellating film 'The King's Speech', becoming a speech therapist will ensure that you gain fame, fortune, and friends in all the right places.

No wait. What I meant to say was that becoming a speech therapist would be the most directly rewarding way to spend your time with other people every single day. Short-term and therefore achievable goals mean a constant source of glowing-from-the-inside job satisfaction.  (See also 'Midwife').

Writer of historical fiction

Have all the love of history but interested in pace, action, and witty nomenclature? Why aren't you already a historical novelist then? You could write books of epic, witheringly accurate proportions. Sweeping accounts of 18th century technological invention told from the viewpoint of the inventions themselves! Or told from the viewpoint of a time travelling visitor from Tudor England. It's fiction. You can do that stuff there.

Cult Leader

(see also Secretary General of the Communist Party)
Except in this incarnation, you'd be running your own anarcho-academic commune in which you grow your own carrots and children don't know the identity of their biological parents.

Live-in Au Pair

Have any rich friends or relatives? Why not offer yourself up as a live-in cook/maid/nanny. You could spend all day making cakes and reading books, and occasionally take a child to the park. Like housewifery but with a higher salary and less emotional anguish.

Yoga Teacher

As someone rightly pointed out today, you'd have 'a flexible schedule'. Get it get it get it?! I'm actually pretty serious about this option, though the likelihood that you'd end up spending your entire day with pampered idiots is pretty high. Luckily by that point you'd probably be really good at meditation and could avoid being dragged down by it all. Win win.

Secretary General of the Communist Party

Apparently the current one is extremely old, so it could merely be a case of getting in with the right people and waiting artfully until the time is right. Also seems to be a promising career choice in terms of available free time, and the degree of excellent facial hair you are likely to grow.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

I have spent the past few years having conversations about what, exactly, I and my friends will do when we grow up. When we emerge from the arrested development of study into the wide world, with shiny degrees and heads full of ideas. Given the current climate within British academia, these conversations have taken an increasingly bleak turn of late. But what if we were to concentrate not on what we won't be doing (writing books, travelling the world, talking to fascinating people, digging through exotic archives) and instead collect the outcomes of conversations about what other options exist? What if we compiled every possible alternative future in one place? What do you want to be when you grow up?