Bucket lists

and other bollocks

To date, this year’s weekly posts have definitely had more than a whiff of rant about them. Which is interesting to me as apart from the terrifying state of the world as being shaped by the tangerine tit in charge over there and his satellites here and elsewhere, I actually feel pretty positive about stuff. Anyway, to bucket lists and their ilk; rant alert ahoy.

I’ve never had a bucket list. I will never have a bucket list. I don’t understand bucket lists. I understand ambitions and goals and wants and needs and desires and choices, but I don’t get that thing of having “must do before I die” lists that you can tick off as you rush fervently on to the next thing, measuring life lived through boxes to be squared away. What happens when you get to the end of the list? Do you jump off a cliff? Do you wallow in existential disappointment? Or perhaps feel that life is now perfect, everything you ever wanted to be/do/see/eat/fuck/buy/control having been done/seen/eaten/fucked/bought/controlled?

It all seems so bleak and ghastly, so performative, so judged and rigidly planned. Where’s the spontaneity, the delight, the sudden new thought, the room for ideas to whizz, bang and pop?

There’s also the problem of relegation. Relegating some wish to the bucket list so that you don’t have to think of it now. You can be all Scarlett O’Hara and put it off to contemplate tomorrow. It can stop you from doing things entirely because for some reason the time isn’t right (when is it ever?), money is tight, you can’t get a week off work or it’s too difficult to plan a train journey this weekend when you’re feeling a bit tired.

I can only think of one thing I’ve wanted in the context of “this is something I will regret doing if I don’t do it”. I said to Andrew, fifteen and a half years ago, that I didn’t want to die without having had my own suckler herd of Devon Ruby cattle. So between us we made it happen. We converted existing barns from dank, dark unsuitable spaces to cowsheds that would keep cows happy in the winter. Fifteen years ago I bought cows, we brought them home and watched them careering about the field, while we stood in wonder. There was so much to learn. But we made it happen and we’ve been learning ever since.

So many of the joyful things in life aren’t about money though (and yes, getting cattle wasn’t something a thirteen-year-old on a fiver a week could do), or about much money. Mostly it’s about making a choice. Saying yes to something. Making time for something. Thinking through the possibilities of something and going for it. My sister asked me the other week what three things would I like to have happen this year. All of them were personal things, but she pointed out that I hadn’t said anything about getting one of my novels published. How weird that I had not gone down that particular road. It hasn’t stopped me actively looking for an agent who likes what they see in the pages I write, and I continue the search. But the things I chose were all stuff I could manipulate, make happen, bring alive, without relying on a third party. One of the three is in the bag, the second is well on its way to being in said bag, and the third is a permanent state of affairs that requires constant attention, so wouldn’t be suitable for bucket lists anyway, because things on bucket lists are either done and dusted, marked up, photographed and ticked off, or slid into a pile of failures to launch.

There’s also something very everyday and pragmatic about buckets, being a farmer. I handle buckets of one sort or another every day of my life, so the idea that something that achieves a lifetime ambition comes in a bucket is very counter-intuitive. Buckets are for feed, muck, water, mineral supplements, discarded veg peelings waiting to anoint the compost heap. If I was to have a list, I’d want it arrayed with sequins and fairy lights, glitter and flash, as much sparkle as possible, trying to outdo the Milky Way on a particularly dark night. The aurora borealis was dancing over Devon this week. Now that’s something to get excited about.