The Not-A-Bucket List Bucket List
I once read somewhere that if all of the time the Earth was spinning was a toilet roll, and you laid it out flat, your time on the planet would be less than the width of a human hair right at the very end. That’s actually a lie: the ghost of Dot Cotton said that in the Eastenders episode where she was buried, but I loved it, and if you can’t take life advice from a fictional chain-smoking nonagenarian, who can you? If I were to choose a more symbolic quote, then perhaps
is more fitting, although that seems a little hollow given she filled her pockets with rocks and drowned herself.
In 78 weeks from the time of writing this, I will be forty years old. Now forty may not seem like a big number once you’re on the other side of it, but to someone who still thinks of himself as twenty-something and who baulks at having to select another age bracket when completing a form online, it is daunting. Don’t get me wrong, age is just a number and you’re only as young as the person you feel and all that, but let’s not pretend that it isn’t a big milestone. Plus the person I feel is only a year younger than me so that doesn’t give me any significant time advantage.
With the average man living in the UK living to 79, I’m already halfway to the sweet caress of death. That doesn’t bother me: I’ll be glad of the sleep by then, and anyway, in the macabre fashion of someone who spends a lot of time contemplating his death (more on that in a bit), I have my final resting place already picked. My husband nixed my idea of having my corpse pressed into the tarmac in a lay-by so I can feel a random lorry driver on top of me just one last time, but we’ve instead agreed I’ll be buried in our local woodland burial plot, with a linden tree planted on top of my plot. Unsure what a linden tree is? All I’ll say is, most of you will recognise the smell, and you’ll understand then why it is so fitting.
No, death doesn’t phase me, but wasting time does. I am, despite my best efforts, in fairly good health. Of course, the noises I make getting out a chair have increased dramatically in the last few years, and I’m inching towards replacing falling over with ‘having a fall’, but for the most part I’m getting along just fine. I’m fully aware of the likelihood that I’ll do myself a random terrifying injury pressing publish on this blog because lord knows fate is a joker, but let’s keep our fingers crossed.
But all that can change in the blink of an eye, especially if that blink is out of sync with the other and only on one side of my face. Think FAST? I rarely do. I have seen terrible things happen to wonderful people and although I’m very lucky, the same could happen to me, or any of us, at any point. And the one thing I don’t want to have as I gasp my last is any regrets about things I wished I had done in life. The only thing anyone ever wants for at the end isn’t wealth and fabulous things, it’s time. Happily ever after doesn’t mean forever: it just means time. Five paragraphs in and I’ve already managed a clumsy River Song reference: high-five!
Throughout my entire life on this planet, I’ve been a worrier. I’m fairly sure I came out of the womb worrying that the doctor would slap my legs too hard and give me a thrombosis. This anxiety takes several forms but the main one is health anxiety, or to give it a proper medical name, being a fanny. I’ve written at length about how I can turn a mild headache into a self-diagnosed brain tumour, or a shake in my wanking hand into Parkinsons. I make light of it, and for the most part it is under control and doesn’t faze me, but the over-analysis of every little ache and pain can get exhausting. Which is unfortunate, given too much exhaustion and I’ll start thinking I have something else wrong with me.
As a direct result of this hypochondria I have avoided putting myself in situations where something bad might happen, however slight the chance of that may be. By way of example, take a cruise. We almost did, in 2019. The idea of going on an adults-only cruise sounded like great fun and after umming and aahing for years, we finally booked ourselves onboard with Virgin Voyage. I was very much looking forward to unlimited food and not having to worry about either the screaming children on a Disney Cruise or the floating obituaries that Viking River Cruises presents. I’m kidding, don’t send me a spidery-style handwritten note.
However, could I get excited? No. See, I remember reading this article on the BBC News website back in 2013 about a lady who was left permanently sea-sick after a cruise, before I knew to avoid any articles which spoke in lurid detail about other people’s illnesses – hypochondriacs are sponges that can absorb any illness they read about, after all. It’s all the prions eating holes in our brain, see.
Her constant dizziness sounded like a living hell to someone who has a funny turn leaning down to put his shoes on. That tiny article stuck with me through the years and even though I know the odds of it happening to a person are infinitesimally small, staying at home was safer yet. You can’t win the hand if you never play your cards, after all. When nature sneezed and the world turned snotty we cancelled the trip and although I made all the appropriately sad faces, I was secretly – whisper it – a tiny bit pleased. Ridiculous.
There’s a myriad of other examples like that, where I’ve delayed putting something off in case I become ill or die, although they’re far more historic. My health anxiety doesn’t faze me so much these days as I take active steps to control it: I don’t google my symptoms, I don’t sweat the small stuff wrong with my body. I have the occasional exciting flare-up where my brain gets bored with thinking about willies and starts pressing me to consider why I rattle when I move quickly or treating me to some visual disturbances to take my mind off my stories. But for the most part, it’s under control, and I haven’t become a shut-in: I still do lots of things that could be considered potentially deleterious to my health: I’ve joined a rugby team, I’ve jumped 110 storeys off a casino in Las Vegas, I went to Las Vegas, all sorts. But always with that slight worry.
On a less dramatic note, I’m especially guilty of that which all but the most arrogant amongst us suffer with – the worry of what others may think. This was especially bad when I was significantly overweight: I’d avoid eating out as I didn’t want people thinking I was a glutton with my Caesar salad with the dressing on the side. I wore clothes that didn’t so much hide my body as politely ask it to leave and never return. I didn’t want to exercise in public lest it invited cruel remarks, I didn’t want to go out in public full stop.
A few years ago I lost the weight and in a refreshing change of pace became too thin, so that was another thing to fixate on. Who knew you could get angst over the size of your head in relation to your shoulders? Then, on the body front at least, I stopped caring what others thought. I wish I could tell you what changed but I realised I was half-past-give-a-shit with that whole business and frankly if you don’t like my body, just be glad I’m not sitting on you. So that’s nice. None of us are as important to everyone else as we like to kid ourselves we are.
Add into the mix a touch of imposter syndrome, a tendency to assume the worst and my unfailing ability to put my foot in it at any given moment and it used to be quite a volatile mix. That’s less of an issue these days as I’ve settled into myself, thankfully. Regardless though, it genuinely infuriates me how many opportunities and times I passed over because I thought I wasn’t good enough, clever enough or witty enough to just try. Every single time I have pushed myself I’ve enjoyed whatever happened next: I had no cause to fret.
Blah blah, endless introspection is an indulgence that bears only bitter fruit, so returning to the present day. I’m at the waning of my thirties and, aside from small niggles, generally very content. I have a wonderful husband who indulges my nonsense and makes me happy, friends who I love and a family who play their part, as long as there’s nothing more interesting on TV. I live a happy little life, not the most exciting by any means, but one that lets me be creative when I remember there’s bills to pay and there’s a Springer Spaniel that needs walking. The last few years especially have been genuinely brilliant, with dream realisation and tonnes of adventures. I’m healthy, have my own teeth (and a fabulous dentist friend if those should fall out) and fortunate. So now, of course, it’s time to get cracking on a bucket list before all that changes.
The bucket list I have drawn up is 39 small things I want to do before I’m 40. If I manage to complete all of them, I’ll also hit 40 – because the 40th entry is the completion of the previous 39. I have given myself exactly 78 weeks to do them in any order, with the aim of completing one once every fortnight. I did toy with the idea of starting when I was 39, but starting something big on a birthday is like giving up smoking on New Years Day, everyone does it and no-one completes it. I should know: I’ve successfully given up nine times. The tenth time will be the charm, which is handy as that’s one of the 39.
It’s important to say right from the off that these ‘tasks’ aren’t going to be massive, exciting affairs like hurling myself off a building or out of an aeroplane, because this isn’t meant as a ‘life’ bucket list. Rather it is a curated list of smaller things I’ve always wanted to do, but put off for one of the reasons listed above or some other nonsense. There are a few tasks on there that are so small I can tick them off in an hour, others will take a few weeks. One of them will take months to prepare for. There’s a couple that I won’t be able to write about for reasons of decency, and to get around that I will write about a wonderful sandwich or something equally as allegoric on those weeks.
All in all though, I’m looking forward to actually working through my list and writing as I go. I’d love to think I’ll hit all 39, but I’ll consider completion of thirty of the tasks as a job well done. I’m also allowing myself three ‘swaps’ from the master list so if I hurtle towards the end and there’s no physical way I’m going to manage the task, I can swap them out for one of the items that I’m keeping in reserve. That’s not a cop-out – for example, if I sneeze and my legs fall off, I’ll struggle doing a marathon. A marathon of course, is not on the cards. I’m not dying.
Finally, this gives me something new to write about. As fun as writing about food can be, especially and mainly and absolutely only the eating part, I’ve ran out of ways to describe a salad without scrunching up my face in anger. If we are to stretch the food analogy a little further, this side-blog and the accounts of the 39 will act as a palate cleanser to hopefully get me writing more. It is what I’ve always wanted to do after all. Although I have a rough timescale for posting in mind, I’m not going to commit to a regular post, more just writing as I check them off. It’s what Dot would have wanted, I’m sure.
J