Most bestestest ever! Heroes - do they really have to be QUITE so fabulous?

Right. Christmas is over - so put down that tin of Celebrations and stop drinking double cream straight from the carton with the fridge door open to cover what you are doing... I am going to force you in to a discussion here, because it's either write this or take the dogs on a three mile run, and there's freezing fog out there and a fire in here, plus two packets of unopened biscuits and the tail end of a Christmas pudding, so...discussion it is!

Reading a lot of blurbs of a lot of books lately, has made me realise that there is a whole stream of books, maybe even a sub-genre, where the active participants in the story seem to have beamed down from the planet PERFECTO.  I'm not talking about the multi-billionaires here, they are a different species already, we all know that.  I'm talking about the ones that aren't just ordinary dog-trainers for the average person in the street whose terrier won't stop widdling on the mat (and yes, Teal, I AM looking at you...and no, insanity is not a defence, so I'm told)

No, they have to be training dogs for military defence work. Or mountain rescue work. Now, I have a reasonable grasp on dog training (although, evidenced by my mat, not a complete one), but have no knowledge whatever of what it takes to train a military dog. More sturdy mats, perhaps. So are these men more attractive by virtue of doing a job that I don't understand?  Dog training is just an example - these men seem to have jobs that are so far outside my normal comprehension of the world that I find them vaguely unrelatable. Of course not many people are going to be interested in reading about a man who cuts lawns and plants potatoes for a living, but there's surely some ground in between him and the TV landscape gardener with the limitless budget who can get five acres of turf down without blinking?

So, my post Christmas question to you is - when does a hero become more than his job? Is a man more attractive because he test drives Lamborghinis rather than Fiats? OK, he might get paid more, but is that all it is - a rich man in a borrowed Lamborghini is more hero-worthy than the bloke down the road in his Fiat 500? How much of who he is is affected by what he does?

Yeah, okay, not doing myself any favours with these pictures, am I?

And now I'm back to mopping the carpet and trying to pretend that the last of the pudding just happened to fall out of the fridge and be eaten by the dog. Or cat. Yes, the cats look slightly guilty. let's blame them..