Stephen Moss: Army officer, second lieutenant, starting salary £24,133

I can't claim I ever seriously considered a career in the army as a 20-year-old, but 30 years later military life appeals. There's an unimpeachable certainty about it that doesn't apply to other jobs. You are there to serve your country, albeit in some dodgy foreign wars. I also like the uniforms. So 30 years too late I am attending the Army Officer Selection Board in Westbury, Wiltshire, to see whether I'm made of the right stuff. This is phase one of the officer selection process: young men and women who pass here go on to Sandhurst, emerging 11 months later as second lieutenants fit to command a platoon of 30 soldiers.

I am sure I'll be a natural, and fancy being a field marshal (a step above general). "Some people come here with a romantic idea of what it means to be in the army," says Brigadier Philip Mostyn, commanding officer at Westbury, "and we make certain that they have no illusions about the seriousness of the business they wish to join." These words will come back to haunt me.

The day begins with a series of tests in verbal, numerical and abstract reasoning. The latter, I know, will be a problem: it involves identifying relationships between shapes, and I have no spatial sense. Lieutenant-Colonel Mark Pomroy, who oversees my day at the camp, describes my performance in that part of the test as "catastrophic". My scores in the other two parts aren't up to much either. "The tests tell us the horsepower of the brain," says Mostyn. My battery appears to be flat.

We move to the gym, where I have to negotiate five obstacles. Some allowance must be made for my 50-year-old self, but even at 20 I would have struggled. I manage to get over the hurdles and just about clamber across a series of bars while carrying a log, but I can't do the long jump, fail to get over the wall (even though I'm allowed to have a go at the smaller women's wall), and fall off the rope on which you're supposed to swing across a barrier.

Incredibly, this is not the worst of it. I am with six other journalists, here to write about army careers, and we go outdoors for some group exercises. We first practise tying knots, and lash a few planks together to improvise a bridge. Pomroy then sets us two tasks: carrying a box and a barrel over an obstacle course without touching the ground. What is remarkable is how one of the group, so self-effacing I had barely noticed him, suddenly takes command, working out a plan and seeing it through with steely determination. I, by contrast, make a total hash of tying two planks together. If I'd been in command of the Normandy landings, Europe would still be waiting to be liberated.

Exhausted, we have lunch in the officers' mess, and here I perform brilliantly, eating a herculean number of sandwiches. If I could go straight in as a gouty field marshal, I'd be sensational. I bet the Duke of Wellington didn't have to pass an abstract reasoning test or excel in the long jump. This is war, not the modern pentathlon.

The final blow comes after lunch, when Pomroy asks us to imagine we are deep in the jungle, when a man falls seriously ill with malaria. How can we get him assistance, while also getting to the airport in time to catch a flight? I fail to read the briefing properly and, rather than get the man to hospital as instructed, have him treated in situ. The upside is that I get to the airport with several hours to spare. "I'll have time to get a drink," I say proudly. The downside is that the malaria victim probably dies. "Your plan is pants," is Pomroy's pithy summing up.

It is clear I am not going to make the grade. The Brigadier offers a crumb of comfort. "Perhaps it's better that you've discovered you wouldn't have made it. Otherwise you might have felt you'd missed out on your perfect career." I ask Pomroy how my platoon would have fared in a war zone. He gives me a lateral answer. "Sometimes your men will follow you not because of your inspirational leadership but because they're intrigued to see what will happen. They will go with you because they're interested . . . but only up to a point."

Sam Wollaston: Fisherman, trainee deckhand, £10,000

Just before Chris Wightman left school, he went to see the careers adviser. The man asked Chris what he planned to do. Chris said he was going to be a fisherman. The man looked it up in his little book, so he could give some advice. But it wasn't there, there was no advice. The job of fisherman didn't exist.

It's easy to believe this, at 6.30am at the fish dock at Lowestoft on the Suffolk coast. There's not an awful lot going on. Lowestoft, the most easterly town in Britain, used to be one of the country's busiest fishing ports, with more than 100 drifters and trawlers operating out of it. Now there are just a dozen or so. One of them is Maximus, a 10 metre (33 foot) boat used mainly for long-lining. It's co-owned by Chris, now 34; and Steve, his 40-year-old brother. Fishing has been in the Wightman family for generations.

We load the lines – 18 in all, each with 240 hooks, baited with squid, coiled in tin baths that are light enough to be carried by hand – on to the boat and head to sea. It's an exciting moment for me. I've always wanted to be a fisherman. I love the sea, and boats, and fish – and the idea of having a proper job, doing something useful. You don't need any specific qualifications, but people can enroll on training courses.

Steve, the skipper, silent and authoritative, looks at his navigation instruments. Chris is the chatty one. It's both the best job in the world, and the worst, he says. How the best? Well, look around – the sun, still low in the east, has turned the water silver, it's calm today, and warm for the end of October. This isn't a bad little place to come to work. But the North Sea can be cold and miserable at times – they don't go out if it's blowing over 20 knots – and, of course, you never know if you're going to catch anything.

Today Steve has picked a spot about two hours south of Lowestoft, 12 miles or so offshore. The lines go out, one after the other, with anchors and chains to keep them to the seabed. This is when it's easy to lose a finger to a hook shooting over the stern, especially if the boat is moving around a lot in a big sea. It's not a job for the work experience boy, but I'm allowed to hose down the empty tin tubs. Thanks guys.

When the line is out, all six miles of it, there's time for a cup of tea before winching it back in again. There aren't many to begin with, a few small thornback rays (skate to you) and dogfish, which are thrown back into the water alive. It's mesmeric watching the line come up, watching and hoping — I can see why Chris says you need to be an optimist to be a fisherman.

Steve says the tide is not running fast enough for a good haul of cod, but there are a few, a beautiful greeny gold when they come out of the water. Plus some bigger thornbacks, whiting and rough hounds – a small shark that usually gets called rock salmon at the chippy because no one would eat a rough hound. I'm allowed to gut the whiting, and when I've mastered that, a few rays. The underside of a ray is an extraordinary thing, like an aeroplane from below. It has a strange mouth, with no teeth, but lips strong enough to crush a cockle. The cod go into iced water, to keep them superfresh. In spite of all the stories, they've had a good couple of years for cod.

Not today though. We get just over a box – about 50kg, worth about £150 at market. And four boxes of thornbacks, which may fetch £350. The experience has been brilliant for me, but Chris and Steve have probably caught just enough to cover their costs – fuel plus the massive loan on the boat. Maybe tomorrow will be better. It's half term and Steve's eight-year-old son, Maximillian (the boat is named after him) will be with them. Is Max going to be a fisherman when he grows up? Of course he is.

Laura Barton: Milliner, £15,000

When my Great Auntie Evelyn died, she was kind enough to bequeath me, along with two mustard-coloured armchairs and a floral-patterned tea service, her large collection of hats – small, brightly hued straw concoctions, a bubble of yellow and white felt, an ocelot-print pillbox, a brown suede bakerboy cap.

It was, you see, Great Auntie Evelyn's hat collection that kindled my early desire to be a milliner, that inspired my fascination with cloches and skullcaps and Philip Treacy and feathers and veiling. I took GCSE textiles and even in the summer of my A-levels I wavered between studying for a degree in English literature and pursuing millinery. I chose the former, and sometimes wonder about all the cocktail hats that might have been.

Up a tiny flight of stairs in London's St James's, lie the showroom and workroom of Rachel Trevor-Morgan. A milliner for 17 years, she "fell into it by mistake" at the age of 19 when she took an apprenticeship with Graham Smith, gradually progressing to her own shop. Her hats are elegant, deeply feminine affairs – a curled peacock alice band; a peach lace crescent with burnt ostrich feathers and a flower; a simple grosgrain disc – and prices vary from £150 to £900 for a couture hat. Most of her work is bespoke, customers ranging from well-to-do society ladies to brides in search of something unusual. She has even made hats for the Queen, including the white and silver number she wore for her diamond wedding.

This is the quiet time of the year, but in the spring, pre-Ascot and just before the wedding season begins in earnest, her showroom downstairs may have as many as eight hour-long appointments each day. Today there is just one, for which Trevor-Morgan is busy dyeing fabric in pans atop a small stove in the kitchen, while her assistants, Lucy and Ann, are working on an order for Harrods that requires the construction of endless bows and flowers.

They sit me down with a bag of white feathers to learn the subtle art of making tiny quills: you choose a small, pretty part near the top of the feather, peel away the lower fronds and snip it sharply at the top. These can be dyed later and used to trim the hat. It is peaceful work; we chatter and listen to the radio, to the sound of rain against the window and the hiss of the steam iron. All the while, Trevor-Morgan's tiny dog, Daphne, slumbers quietly in a basket in the fireplace.

After lunch, Lucy teaches me to block a hat, while we listen to the Archers and Radio 4's afternoon play. We're making a delicate little teardrop of a hat, which starts life as stiff, webbed, white cotton fabric cut to shape and then moulded to the block with the heavy, huffy iron. The edges are glued down and smoothed and then the teardrop is covered in pink slub silk and finished with near- invisible stitches. It's fiddly work, and I'm a little cackhanded, but I love it. The pink teardrop can be trimmed and then attached to a headband, worn at an angle on the head.

I'm thoroughly enjoying my taste of the millinery life, though I suspect that with time I might come to miss the variety of journalism; I'm not sure I'm altogether made for a job where I know what I am likely to be doing each morning.

For now, though, it's much nicer than staring at a computer screen all day, and there is something truly thrilling about actually making something tangible, something beautiful that someone would keep for ever.

Tim Dowling: Local reporter, £15,000

I sidled into journalism without really knowing what skills, qualifications or experience were required. By the time I realised just how underqualified I was, it was too late to give the money back. I have, however, always harboured dreams of having the benefit of training and a long apprenticeship. A day's work experience as a reporter on the Hackney Gazette wasn't going to provide either, but it might give me some sense of what I'd missed.

The Gazette shares its offices – a pair of shopfronts in Bethnal Green, east London – with two sister papers, the Docklands and the East London Advertiser. Sitting in the office of group editor Malcolm Starbrook, it is immediately dispiriting to find out that had I presented myself as a prospective employee, he wouldn't have taken me on. Successful recruits have usually already completed an accredited course and have a minimum shorthand rate of 100 words a minute, as opposed to my zero. There is no shortage of applicants, even though the pay is terrible. "We can afford to be quite tough at the interview stage," says Starbrook.

Nevertheless, he is happy to let me be his trainee for a day. "There are a few things we can show you," he says. "Have you ever done a death knock?"

"No," I say, feeling the blood drain from my face. I want to go home already.

Starbrook has a chat with reporter Victoria Huntley about an incident the previous week when a local man doused himself in petrol and set himself alight in front of his estranged wife and their two kids. He tells her to go out and find the family, and instructs me to go with her. It will be my first death knock.

On the train I'm hoping we'll fail to find anyone to talk to. The police haven't released the dead man's name, and the details are sketchy. It's the sort of story that, if it wasn't reported by the Hackney Gazette, wouldn't be reported at all.

When we arrive at the road in question, we find a pile of flowers and cards. Several of the cards mention a man's first name, but they all spell it differently. Undeterred, Huntley picks a house opposite the flowers and knocks. When she gets no answer, she tries the next one along. A woman comes to the window, then the door. She is barefoot, wearing a blue bathrobe and holding a cat. She is, it transpires, the mother of the estranged partner of the dead man. Huntley asks her a few questions in a soft voice, noting down the woman's answers in elegant shorthand.

"When he said he was gonna do it, we didn't believe him," says the woman. That's about all I manage to write down. I stare down towards the end of the road, where a bendy bus is passing. The interview will form the basis of next week's front-page story, headlined HUMAN FIREBALL HORROR.

On the way back to the office I realise that although the death knock was a lot of things – grim, tragic and an experience I would never care to repeat – it didn't seem particularly intrusive. The woman seemed quite keen to explain things.

"It's rare that people don't want to talk to us," says Starbrook when I ask him about it later. "In that moment they're keeping that person alive, by talking about them." He says it's not unusual for the families of victims to come to the office to provide photographs and biographical details.

By late afternoon Starbrook is standing behind a subeditor suggesting headlines ("What about 'SICK PERVERT RUINED MY LIFE'?") and I have moved on to a story about some film project, caught between an editor who wants me to write it and a PR who doesn't. "It's not a public event," the PR says when I ring. At least, I think, I'm not doing any harm. Then I kick a wire under my desk, accidentally unplugging four computers, including mine. I try to log back on using a succession of passwords suggested by colleagues, eventually locking myself out of the system. IT has to be called and I decide I have delighted the Hackney Gazette long enough.

• This article was amended on 6 January 2010. In one reference in the original, Malcolm Starbrook appeared as Starbuck. This has been corrected.

Emine Saner:

Veterinary surgeon, £30,000

"If you feel faint or queasy, sit on the floor," says Laura Bowen, one of the vets at Hall Place Veterinary Centre just outside Maidenhead in Berkshire. Some student vets do, she says, so I shouldn't feel bad.

I don't think I'm squeamish, but now I'm worried that I'm going to throw up over the anaesthetised Jack Russell on the table in front of us. It is about to be spayed and lies on its back, its paws in the air in a parody of a dead dog. Bowen makes a slice a few inches along the dog's shaved belly; I stay on my feet. She puts her fingers inside the dog and pulls until I hear a sickening pop – she was detaching an ovarian ligament – attaches clamps to stem the blood flow, does a bit more snipping and then pulls out the womb and ovaries and spreads them out on the bit of blue paper towel on her steel trolley. I don't feel sick; it is fascinating. Bowen then stitches up the Jack Russell as neatly as the seams on a wedding dress.

Bowen, 48, has been a vet for 25 years and has treated everything from elephants and tigers (castration for them) to farm animals and pets. She once operated on a hamster to remove bladder stones, after its owner insisted. I can understand this – when my guinea pig, Ruby, was ill, I spent more than £2,000 on ultrasound scans, x-rays, hysterectomy surgery, and six months of drug treatment. As a child I wanted to be a vet, as many do; as an adult, the vet who treated Ruby took on the status of a god to me and I began to seriously wonder whether I had made the wrong choice of career.

Today is spay day. It takes two nurses to lift a German Shepherd, out cold, a tube down her throat, on to the operating table. As Bowen gets to work, I notice my tummy is rumbling, then I notice Bowen's is too. So does she. She looks up, scalpel in hand. "It's not a very nice thought, but there's a theory that it's the carnivore in us," she says. "That it's our body's reaction to the scent of fresh blood." I look at the deep pink liquid spilling around the wound and am troubled; I've been vegetarian for 23 years and, even if I wasn't, I probably wouldn't eat a dog.

I spend the rest of the afternoon in the kennels, checking that the dogs are recovering and gently scratching their noses through the bars. I realise I would have loved to have been a vet, but I doubt that I would have made it – Bowen says you need three science A-levels at A grade, and even that's not a guarantee you'll get in to vet school, which is very competitive (it's a popular profession and there just aren't enough places to go around; interestingly the balance of the genders has switched too – once it was overwhelmingly male, now more women are qualifying). If you do get a place, you train for five years. But what a lovely life – you are around animals all day, and it must be very satisfying to diagnose, operate and cure them. Bowen clearly loves it.

But what, I ask her, is it like to put an animal down, something I was dreading having to witness? "It's always hard, says Bowen, "but you do it because it's the right thing for the animal."

• This item was amended 4 January 2010. Due to an editing change, the original referred to Maidenhead in Kent. This has been corrected.

John Crace: University lecturer, up to £43,000

"You'll be great," says Dr Corinna Wagner, steering me into the largest lecture theatre in Exeter University's arts faculty. I'm not so sure. The notes on "Humour in literary criticism" I'd knocked out over the weekend feel horribly inadequate now I'm facing a virtual full-house of academics and students. The English department is one of the best in the country – outscoring Oxford and Cambridge at the last research assessment exercise – and I fear this could be the first lecture where the entire audience is better informed than the speaker.

An hour later I'm done. Thanks to an extensive pre-coating of anti- perspirant there are no telltale signs of excessive anxiety and the applause at the end goes beyond the mere polite. The talk has ended up – more or less – at the place where I intended in the allotted time and if I have papered over any cracks in my own argument by keeping the laughs coming regularly, no one seems to mind. Best of all, Sam North, lecturer in creative writing, invites me back to give another talk – paid this time. I could get used to this.

But then a university academic was what I always wanted to be – until my time as a postgrad at the LSE in the 80s exposed the fact I just wasn't bright enough to make head nor tail of the post-structuralists. So with what I am convinced is intentional irony, Wagner invites me to watch her deliver her contribution to the following day's 9am lecture on a "Post-structuralist approach to Keats' Ode to Autumn".

It's an eye-opener. Not the post-structuralism – nearly 30 years on I'm none the wiser, though I suspect one of the reasons I always understood so little is because there's bugger all to understand – but the performance. Wagner commands the room. She paces around, waving her arms passionately. I haven't a clue whether she believes a word of what she's saying, but she's so in control of her material that she's an entirely convincing cultural chameleon. It's up to the students to make up their minds about what she's saying.

Discussing ideas that may or may not be crap; testing theoretical approaches for the hell of it; working away at your own research: it's my idea of heaven, though you need at least a PhD to be in with a shout of a job these days, and now tuition fees have been thoroughly commodified, you're likely to have to put yourself £50K in debt just to get to the starting line. "It is a great life," says Professor Tim Kendall, head of department, "but you don't want to get too romantic about it. There is the research excellence framework . . ."

Ah, yes – the spanner in every academic's life. Even though the next deadline is more than three years away, the university has already made everyone aware what is expected of them in terms of the cash value of research grants pulled in and the number and quality of journals in which they should have their work published. With no tenure, any academic who doesn't come up to scratch can find themselves out on their ear, so much of an academic's life is spent filling in grant proposals online.

Towards the end of the day, Wagner takes me to her two-hour seminar on the romantic poets and I get to meet the students close-up. Some academics grumble that their job would be perfect but for the students, but Wagner's mob seem agreeable enough. Sure, one or two appear to regard the two hours as a punishment to be endured before the evening's fun, but most make impressive efforts to engage with the text.

And then there's . . . let's call him B. The guy is a phenomenon. Sharp as you like, armed to the teeth with references, steeped in theory, B trades ideas with Wagner and neither gives an inch. He reminds me of those students at the LSE who helped expose my own ignorance. I don't care how you do it, B. Somehow you've got to find the £50k. You're a born academic. Go and have the career I always wanted.

Hannah Pool: Hairdresser, up to £20,000

I spend the day before my work experience at Junior Green Hair and Beauty salon flicking through the pages of Black Hair Magazine for inspiration and worrying about what to wear. "There's no uniform as such, but we tend to wear all black," says Green, when I call him in a fluster. Of course they do, they're hairdressers.

I have been fascinated by hair and hairdressing for as long as I can remember. I suspect it's because when I was growing up in Manchester I had such hideous experiences at the hands of white hairdressers who didn't have a clue what to do with my afro. And now, here I am in a smart Knightsbridge salon run by the award-winning hairdresser Junior Green and his partner (in both senses) Joy Miller. With 40 years of hairdressing experience between them, their mission is to provide a West End hairdressing experience at a reason- able price for those with afro hair.

My day starts with colourist Janet Xisto showing me how to apply highlights. "I'm not that keen on cutting and blowdrying, but I love the challenge of colour," says Xisto, who got into hairdressing at 15, via the traditional route of a Saturday job, before going to hair college and working part-time at a salon. Xisto shows me how to apply the correct amount of colour and wrap the hair carefully in tinfoil. Before I can do any serious damage, I'm whisked off to Nadine Haynes, at the back, to learn the art of giving a good shampoo. "Massage the scalp," says Haynes, while showing me how to hold my hands. "Don't use your nails, use the cushion of your fingertips." I try asking the client about her holidays in a bid to distract from my poor shampooing technique. I'm hoping we'll move from holiday chat to salacious gossip, but it doesn't happen. Often quoted as the happiest profession, hairdressers are personal stylists, therapists and confidantes, rolled into one. But I think you have to be able to give a decent shampoo before anyone tells you their secrets.

Green calls me over to a woman who is having a Rihanna-inspired haircut. He shows me how to hold the scissors properly (using my thumb and third finger) and I feel as if I have hit the big time. Under his watchful eye, I cut tentatively and try not to panic when hair falls on the floor. Moments later I'm sweeping the hair off the floor, and figuring out how many shampoos it would take before I could have my own Knightsbridge salon. If I could skip the years of bad pay and working my way up, I'd be tempted to give it a go.

Maxton Walker: Special effects artist, £20,000

Watching Jon Pertwee's features magically melting into those of Tom Baker in Doctor Who: Planet of the Spiders is one of my earliest and most formative memories, so I can't quite believe what's happening on an unseasonably mild November morning in central London. "Here's the script for the Christmas Day episode," says Will Cohen, head of TV at the Mill visual effects company in central London. "Read it and have a think about how you'd tackle the effects."

I hunker down on a sofa, almost too excited to concentrate. I and my colleagues for the day – 60 "cool nerds" overwhelmingly in their 20s and 30s – are crammed together in a surprisingly dark and stuffy attic, working on the special effects for various television projects. Jabberwoks, dragons and Tardises are lurching, snarling and spinning on the banks of PCs running an array of specialist software with names such as Maya, Shake and Nuke.

I'm intrigued by an early scene in my script where John Simm's The Master makes his entrance in a "vortex of light". In an editing suite, Marie Jones, the producer responsible for ensuring Doctor Who's digital effects are up to scratch and finished on time, loads up an early edit of the scene; one put together before the effects have been added. The actual shot is almost finished; it took various artists at the Mill a combined total of 90 days on their computers to put together the vortex. The artists use specialist software to create the vortex and then the actors' movements have to be painstakingly mapped out on the computer so the streams of light can interact with them. (Nearly 1,200 working days went into the digital effects for the final two David Tennant episodes that were shown over Christmas.) Marie admits that her job is essentially managing a hugely complex logistical task.

I feel I'm more the obsessive artist/ nerd type, so after lunch I hook up with Simon Wicker, who, on the computer, "paints" backgrounds of alien planets and other scenery, on to which the actors are later placed. I'm not so much envious of him as murderously jealous – he stole the life I was supposed to have.

A life-long Doctor Who obsessive and Star Wars fan, Wicker worked on the effects of Gladiator. After they won an Oscar for the Mill, he was hired to work on the new Star Wars films – "I thought it was a wind-up when they first called" – and went to the US. When he returned, the new Doctor Who was just starting up. "I'd knocked off one of my obsessions, so I thought I should tackle another," he says.

Is it too late for me to change career? Maybe not. Cohen says that London is in such demand as a centre for CG effects that he can't hire enough good people. Many do specialist courses – at places such as computer animation school Escape Studios – before spending a couple of years as "runners". It is not completely unheard of, though, for people just to start at the bottom and work their way up – you can learn on the job. While we're taking pictures, I chat with Marie and correct her over a plot point. The photographer looks at me in horror. "Jesus," she says. "You know more about Doctor Who than the people who make it." Maybe there's such a thing as being too obsessed.

Amy Fleming: Landscape gardener, up to £20,000

"Working with seasons and life cycles," says "Capability" Chris O'Donoghue, gazing out at the dew rising from the fields, "you feel deeply aware that we're all part of the same thing. Ending up back in the earth seems natural rather than scary."

I only arrived half an hour ago, but already some of the assumptions I have made about gardening for a living, while having been cooped up in an office for the past 14 years, have been validated. It's not only good for your body, it also soothes your soul.

I am spending a day helping O'Donoghue to maintain the grounds of a small estate in East Sussex. A former potter, he started gardening professionally six years ago, when his work as a freelance model and mould-maker began to dry up. He placed an ad in the local paper and got work immediately, so quickly learned the ropes by studying gardening books (his top recommendation is Nicola Ferguson's Right Plant, Right Place). He now has three Chelsea Flower Shows under his belt where, just shy of a gold, he won two silver-gilt medals and one silver.

There is to be no gentle planting for me today. I am sent up in a cherry picker – a crazy portable lift on a spindly looking hydraulic boom – armed with a pair of secateurs to prune the wisteria that has gone ballistic around the third floor windows. Every time I lean over to grab bits of the plant, I feel the picker wobble in the wind. I am terrified, but the view is stunning from up here. Next, I am moved on to the leaf blower, which consists of a petrol engine strapped on your back and a fat hose. At first it's fun – I feel like a ghostbuster! But an hour later I'm bored. No matter how hard I try, I can't make the leaves behave and, in any case, the trees are shedding them faster than I can blow them.

Come tea-time, we decamp to O'Donoghue's workshop so I can look at his garden designs over tea and biscuits. I zone out a little, suddenly feeling shattered. I go home still in love with the idea of being a gardener, but O'Donoghue's job is largely solitary, and to imagine myself in his shoes full-time is to imagine a world impossibly quiet. Gardening will have to remain a hobby for the time being.

• This item was amended on 6 January 2010. The original named the gardener as Chris O'Donohughe. This has been corrected.

Steve Chamberlain: Plumber, up to £21,000

Like most middle-aged men who have ever assembled an Ikea bookcase or fixed a dripping tap by turning it off really hard, I have long harboured fantasies of jacking it all in and getting a proper job – the kind with a toolbox and a van to cart it around in. So I'm giving plumbing a go.

I'm doing a bathroom in east London and my mentor for the day is Rick from Roman Baths who says he sort of drifted into the game. One look at his tiling tells me I'm in the hands of a master and there won't be any drifting today.

The first thing I have to deal with though is tea – or rather my dislike of it. Rick has a whole bucket of equipment for making it, rather like a mobile Starbucks, and it sees a lot of action through the day. "No tea?" he says suspiciously. "Are you sure? Well it's straight to work then."

OK, so hand me my blowtorch and some copper piping and let's finish this sucker so we can get down to some serious white van-driving . . . Actually no, Rick won't let me loose on anything that might leak: it's tiling for me.

I've seen the videos in B&Q, so this should be easy enough: slather adhesive all over the place and put some grooves in with a special tool. "Never take any notice of those DIY videos," warns Rick. "They assume you're working in the perfect house. In the real world you're never the master. Look at this wall: it's all over the place, it bows in and out, bulges everywhere. All that has to be overcome."

So begins a long morning of unlearning the little I thought I knew about tiling – it's painstaking and fiddly work. But at least you can earn good money. I've seen all the ads for courses that promise a plumber's salary of £50,000 a year. What could I expect starting out, I ask, as a plumber's mate, say? "Maybe £50 a day. More experience might see you to £120 a day," says Rick. More experience means an NVQ at a local college or an independent training organisation.

Eventually we break for lunch – only half an hour though. Sometimes Rick says he doesn't take one at all. Damn, this is proper work, with heavy lifting and everything. And then there's all the tea drinking on top of that. I'm not so sure I can handle this after all.