Things we want to do before we die
Sunday, May 10, 2009 
My daughter, who is 12, has made a list entitled "Things I want to do before I die". I thought I would share it with you. "Own a dog" is predictable, but "sky diving" and "bungee jumping"? She certainly didn't get that from her parents. Here is the list in full:
1. Bungee jumping
2. Sky diving
3. Own a Bichon Frise dog
4. Own a cat
5. Live in south Glasgow
6. Go to university
7. Get married/have children
8. Speak fluent French/Spanish
9. Live with one of my friends
10. Live in America (LA, New York or Tennessee possibly)
11. Get a good job
12. Own my own detached house
13. Own a Smart car
14. Go on holiday to Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Madrid, San Francisco, Hawaii, Mecca
Funnily enough, had I made a similar list when I was younger, I too would have written "Live in America". But first I wanted to:
- Become a journalist
- Write a book
- Live in London
- Drive a Mini
- Visit Moscow
- Work for Private Eye
- Edit The Spectator
- Make someone cry (just kidding)
No prizes for guessing which of those I haven't done! Now, at the age of 50, the list would include (in no particular order):
1. Round the world cruise
2. Visit Australia, China, Iceland and the Middle East
3. Live in a Georgian manor house
4. Own a second home
5. Move to Dorset, Devon, Derbyshire or France
6. Own a 4×4
7. See my kids through university
8. Walk the London Marathon
9. Retire
Last but not least, I want to live to see Chelsea win the Champions League!
You might like to send me your own list.
Reader Comments (16)
Nuff Jocks in England already thanks please don't.
In no particular order of merit:
1. Win enough dough to quit work.
2. Get to sleep with Scarlett Johansson
3. Punch Patricia Hewitt and Deborah Arnott
4. Get to vote for a PROPER 'Conservative Party'
5. Get to smoke a fag down my local again
6. Get to sleep with Scarlett Johansson
7. Punch Patricia Hewitt and Deborah Arnott
8. Learn to avoid unnecessary repetition
9. Punch Patricia Hewitt and Deborah Arnott
1. Get out of the EU.
2. See Gordon Brown imprisoned and tried as a
traitor.
3. Enjoy a fag and half of bitter in my local
pub once more.
1. To see real public consultations one day.
2. For Emma Bunton to know I exist.
To see New-Labour or Labour (whatever they deem to call themselves) thrown into oblivion for good - not for generations. They need to be destroyed and obliterated.
To be free and choose to live the lifestyle that is me. I pay for it, so why should anything else matter?
Ones that come to mind are:
1. See my kids happy.
2. Fag and a pint inside my local.
3. Win the World Series of Poker's HORSE event. It is the 5 major variants of poker and you are considered to be the best player in the world, should you win.
4. Master Grieg's Piano Concerto in A Minor, or at least pass my grade 8 piano.
5. Drink Ranald MacDonald's finest bottle of vintage port at Boisdale, and accompanying cigar. Preferably in the company of the Simon and the Taking Liberties contributors.
5. Phone up ASH and gloat because the government and pharmaceutical companies have pulled all of their funding.
6. Spurs win the Champions League.
7. With reference to 4 and 5 play play on the keyboards at Boisdale on Friday night when Reuben Richard's is on.
8. Find out Liz Hurley is stalking me.
1. Have freedom of choice and true democracy back again.
2. Only work if I want to and not because I have to.
3. Legalise euthanasia, just in case we can't get rid of the corrupt morons in politics.
4. Any government expenses to means tested, just like pensioners and others trying to claim benefits!
5. Live my life as I want to, so long as I am not harming anyone else
1. Emigrate
2. Waken up and find that today's UK has just been a bad dream and, if that fails,
3..Emigrate
4. Win the lottery (one million will do) and
5..Emigrate
6. Have George Clooney pestering me for a date in which case I'll
7. Emigrate
8..Find work that I can do overseas
9. Read that an investigative journalist with clout has exposed the tobacco control lobby and that their 'science' is completely discredited, their funding withdrawn, all of them have lost their jobs and every smoking ban has collapsed. If all of the above fail
10. Save up for a one way ticket to Switzerland
I too would like to do what I did for 45 years: sit in a pub with a pint and a smoke. There is a bar in a local I occasionally visited before the ban which had a wall full of black and white pictures from the second world war. They were of groups of airmen gathered about their planes waving and grinning. At the door of that same pub this evening two lonely men stood with their cigarettes and pints. A chill wind was blowing from the north east. What would those young aircrew have made of that - and what success would some mincing pocket Hitler have had if he had dared tell them to put their cigarettes out? We write here because the mainstream media are deaf to us. Perhaps the politicians might take time away from their flat screen TVs and take a sounding of the resentment and sadness voiced here and in other websites. David Cameron. Are you listening? Those airmen protected you as well.
Norman -
Precisely !
PLEASE write to Mr Cameron - and let us know what sort of reply YOU get (probably 'written' by his kid sister-in-law).
I'm dying to know whether Mr Bendy has the sense AND the humanity to 'bend' in the RIGHT direction for once.........
Martin: thanks for that comment. It would take more time than I am able to spare to trace and then give chapter and verse but I have written to or e-mailed my Conservative MP, copy to David Cameron. I hope the fence on which the party policy chiefs sit has nothing sharp on it. It must be painful for them. My MP broadly ignored my appeal for him to leave aside disputable statistics and look at the principles involved in forcing a ban where it is not wanted and where comfortable indoor provision can be made for people on both sides of the argument. As I recall, he based his caution on being undecided about second hand smoke. Perhaps he wasn't listening. Maybe he was repeating a half-absorbed party line. Or he could simply not be equipped to follow a line of thinking which requires some ability to put a principle before a predisposition. As I remember, I didn't hear from Mr Cameron's office. As I've said before on this site, the Tories have an open goal in front of them, but they have one eye and half an ear cocked away from that in the direction of some deeply unloved health zealots whose powers of propaganda perhaps they respect too much.
Norman wrote: There is a bar in a local I occasionally visited before the ban which had a wall full of black and white pictures from the second world war.
I have a colour photo of my uncle from that time. He was a Spitfire pilot, and one of the "Few". His name is on the Battle of Britain war memorial on the Thames embankment in London.
For a long time he was a mystery to me, but after gazing for a long time at the photo, in which he he stands impishly grinning in his pilot's uniform, I realised that he must have been a bit of a rebel. For his service dress cap is tilted at an unseemly angle, and one hand is in a trouser pocket, and the other discreetly holds a cigarette. It spoke volumes about what kind of man he was, and why he had volunteered to join the RAF before the war started.
I often wonder what he would make of modern Britain, now that an insidious, institutional form of Nazism has returned to slowly strangle it, and to take away all the freedoms he fought for.
And I wish he was still alive. Alas, he did not survive the war. And I never met him.
That is much of the problem Idlex - too many of us have family who fought in both world wars, some survived, many didn't, but the vast majority smoked, for some part of their rations were cigarettes!
They fought for freedom in this country, freedom that we did once enjoy, but sadly now is being eroded day by day by an increasingly power hungry, but inept government and sadly, the main opposition are little better, if at all.
I often imagine my grandfather turning in his grave at the thought of all those lives lost only for our own government to end up doing Hitlers work for him! In that respect, I am glad he is not still here to see what is happening to the once great country he fought for and supported through 2 wars.
How any of us can hold our heads up having allowed this government to get away with what amounts to treason is a travisty. The majority of MP's should be arrested and charged now with Treason and the death penalty should be reinstated for this crime forthwith! It is the only way our now sad excuse for a country will have any chance of regaining some of its former glory!
Some time after the war, maybe the mid fifties, OAPs received an allowance of cheap cigarettes as part of their pension. (Yes they did!) I think they were given coupons for them. I remember my grandfather, who had been a soldier in France for all four years of the 1914-18 war and died in 1973 at the age of 88, switching then to tipped Woodbines. I think you got more cigarettes for the money.
In 1977 I had a serious head injury, unconcious for three days, semi concious for six weeks, and 'signed off' for seven months. One of my few memories of my two weeks in hospital is the smoking room, or rather, the rest room where you could smoke. I was let out of hospital before I was fully able to be left unattended, because my wife of the time (I collect them, bless her) agreed to supervise me.
Now I am getting to the good bit. She was told that if I had any chest pains (they had detected a heart murmer) she must get me back to the hospital immediately. Now she was a little worried, why?, because I was practically chain smoking. She phoned the neurologist who was dealing with me, and expressed her anxiety. His reply? I understand your worries about him smoking so much, but that is the least of our worries at the moment.
Don't times change.