The UnBucket List

You know that film The Bucket List? I haven’t seen it myself but I gather it’s about two old men, facing terminal illness, who set off an on an odyssey to do or see before they die, all the things they’ve wanted to do for years and never got around to. It sounds a good idea – something like that book (which I haven’t read) 100 Things To Do Before You Die.

Well, I have an UnBucket List. It comprises all those things I have decided I am never going to have to do again.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not unadventurous. I’ve abseiled down the local City Centre building, ballooned with one of the country’s foremost balloonists, canoed in Wales, Canada and New Zealand, glided over Dartmoor, learned to windsurf in Canada, toasted a cheese sandwich in the fumerole of a simmering volcano, walked through three countries in one day, skied down more mountains you can shake a stick at and travelled in around 15 countries. Even though I probably won’t do all (or many) of those again, they aren’t the things on my UnBucket List.

That List is of  things like skittle evenings. Long-haul flights. Driving all day to some distant town where you have to spend a dark, rainy rush-hour finding first your hotel and then the venue (even sat-nav can’t always find you somewhere to park) where you are to give a talk to those readers enthusiastic enough to leave their own cosy firesides to hear you. Usually quite a few, to be fair, and I like doing the talk & chat afterwards, but it’s the driving there & back, the night away and all the sheer time and energy it takes… These days, I’ve decided, I only do talks if I can get there and back in the day. Or stay with family or friends.

I remember once going to Kidderminster. This was before sat-nav, and Kidderminster had changed a lot since my last visit, when I was researching my Carpetmakers trilogy. It was late November, wet as only late November can be, and in the search for the guest-house where I’d been booked in, I got completely snarled up in going-home traffic and found myself exploring the one-way system in depth. Several times. When I finally found the guest-house and set out again for the talk venue, everyone was going out for the evening and the traffic and the rain were just as bad. Not only that, the one-way system seemed to be going a different way. And when I’d given the talk, having arrived panting and bedraggled five minutes before I was due to start, I faced the further challenge of finding the guest-house again. I tried every road out of Kidderminster before I found it and got there just before they locked the front door for the night. (To add insult to injury, at breakfast next morning one of the other guests had a streaming cold which I developed three days later…)

And skittle evenings. I used to enjoy these on skiing trips to Austria, when we’d all had plenty of gluwhein and were ready and willing to join in the ludicrous games organised by the rep. But the one I was invited to by friends last winter wasn’t like that. It took place in a pub somewhere in the depths of Cornwall and was organised by the male voice choir they belong to. Oh, nice, I thought, a few games of skittles, a few drinks, a meal and then a rousing sing-song. I’ll enjoy that.

Wrong again. The people were nice, my friends kind (but teetotal), and the food was good. But the skittles… well, just let’s say the games went on for rather a long time. Tournaments do. I was knocked out pretty soon, as might be expected, and after a while, knowing nobody else there, the excitement of it all sort of dwindled away.

It came to an end at last and supper was declared.  Ah. Now for the sing-song. But no. After the raffle (which went on for about half an hour, leaving me with a strange sort of vase with bits of stick in it which  I still don’t know the purpose of) it was announced that we would now do ‘Killer’. Rapturous applause. Killer? I asked. What’s that?

It was worse than the tournament. It was a kind of torture by elimination in which everyone took part – once again, I was knocked out pretty well from the beginning – and it went on for hours and hours and hours. Well, until long  after 11.30 pm, anyway. And we still had the long, dark journey home to face.

Sailing is on my UnBucket List too. I’ve done a couple of sailing holidays, one on Windermere which wasn’t too bad at all, mainly because there was no wind  and we had to use the engine quite a lot and there was always a pub to go to in the evenings, and one on Loch Lomond. There wasn’t much wind then  either, but always the possibility of it, so we had to spend an hour or so each morning threading ropes through eyelets, not unlike the procedure (which I found equally tedious) my mother used to go through when threading her old Singer sewing-machine. After that, it was a matter of trying to catch what little wind there was and get it to take us somewhere. On one day, when I learned the true meaning of the phrase ‘bored to tears’, we took three hours to go three-quarters of a mile, tacking between the mainland (I was tempted to jump ship every time we came within jumping distance) and a small island about 300 yards offshore. Gazing miserably down in to the clear water, I got to know every rock in the bed of the loch as an intimate friend and promised to send one or two of the more attractive ones Christmas cards. (I never did, though. I mean, you just don’t, do you.)

Apparently, to the man at the helm, this was a challenge of monumental excitement and a proof of his skills. Well, there’s no accounting for tastes but this may well have been the start of my UnBucket List.

And Long Haul Flights? Well, I don’t even need to tell you. Anyone who has endured one of these knows that when Stevenson remarked that it was better to travel hopefully than to arrive, he had never been on a Long Haul Flight. Not that hope isn’t a major part of it. Hope and prayer together, I’d say, and heartfelt promises to be good for the rest of your life if this could just be over soon. They say that, like having a baby, you forget the pain, but that’s not true. I haven’t forgotten either, and I’m not doing either, ever again. Not that giving birth needs to go on my UnBucket List. Nature has seen to that.

Those are just a few of the entries on my List, but you get the idea. And I was inspired to mention it because I see that the film is to be shown on TV again next week.

I shan’t watch it, though. It might just inspire me to do some of those things I always wanted to do. Like trek through Patagonia (Long-Haul Flight). Climb Vesuvius. Or go on a cruise to the Antarctic (LHF followed by sea-sickness.) It’s too much of a risk.