Thanks for the suggestions from friends and family for
things to add to my fifty list – keep them coming; some interesting ones in
there – Irish dancing and writing fan fiction.
Not sure about the fan fiction, I
don’t watch a huge amount of TV to begin with, apart from Match of the Day and
I’m not sure anyone would want to read about a scenario involving Gary Lineker,
Alan Hansen and Mark Lawrenson! ER was
my biggest commitment, I don’t think I missed a single episode, but I never
quite got over the shock of discovering Ray had lost his legs! And I so didn’t want it to end – I remember
feeling quite put out when the camera panned away from everyone in the
ambulance bay, carrying on with their lives, from which I was now going to be
excluded, although I have to contend that it was probably the best and only way
for it to happen. It also means that fan
fiction could go in just about any direction.
Maybe Doug and Carol could discover that the kidney they managed to
persuade Susan Sarandon’s character to grant donation of ended up saving
Carter’s life?
Irish dancing is kind of a family
joke – well, the joke being that I like to pretend that I can do a spot of
‘Riverdancing’ in a Catherine Tate ‘Oh, I can do that!’ sort of way. Sad, I know, but I like to think it’s mildly
entertaining, or at least it might have been the first time! Maybe I ought to learn to do it properly then
– after all if Ant and Dec can do it, I’m sure I can.
Apart from that I’ve been starting
to loosely plan when I’m going to do some of the things on my list. So ice skating in early April, the Folkestone
Boxing day Dip will obviously be on Boxing Day, skydiving sometime in the
summer, having a tattoo will have to be timed for after a blood donating
session … maybe a visual calendar would be a good way to collate all the
suggestions and map them out over the year?
Of course, when I first started
thinking about doing fifty things for the first time, I thought it would be
relatively easy. For starters how hard
could it be to come up with fifty things I’d never done before? I was sure there were way more than
that. And also because it was about nine
months away at that time, it was definitely a case of there being loads of time
to plan it out and organise everything.
But time has a habit of slipping away, disappearing amongst all the
things you have to do every day, and then before you know it, you’re down to
the last few grains silently vacating the sand timer and all you can do is
watch them disappear at a seemingly ever-quickening pace, when what you really
should be doing is putting every effort into completing the task you had to
achieve before the time ran out. I turn
fifty in precisely two weeks, so in fifteen days time, my sand timer will be
turned over and those 365 days of sand grains will start to slowly allow
gravity to do its job. There will be no
turning back, no starting again, no changing my mind, only the option of
completing the fifty tasks I end up setting out for myself. No pressure then!
