Top Ten To Do’s Before You Die.

I often see lists or charts created by people listing the activities, tasks and places to visit before they die. More often than not these lists are totally ridiculous and down right unachievable.

1. Find cures for Cancer, H.I.V. and Ebola
2. Be the first person on Mars
3. Sail around the world solo on the back of a smokes packet
4. Score the winning hat-trick in the UEFA champions league final
5. Win 12 gold medals at an Olympic games (summer and winter)
6. Become King/Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Northern Ireland and the Commonwealth
7. Do a three year stint as secretary general of the United Nations
8. Bring a dinosaur back to life
9. Broker a lasting middle east peace deal
10. Save a whale/rhino/hippo/giant panda or other large mammal from extinction.

There is nothing like ambition. “If you aim for the moon, you may die on the way”. I think it is reasonable to have a list of worthwhile activities to achieve while on this rock but keep your ambition within the realm of sanity.

Investigating this subject, I find that there is a vast number of websites that are not only able to offer advice on things to do before you die but turn you upside down and shake the money from your pants in an attempt to organise it on your behalf. Take trifter.com as an example of flourishing ideas. My new friends at trifter have listed at number 1, “Go sky diving, Taking a leap-of-faith out of the cargo hold on a B90 King Air airplane at an altitude of approximately 30,000ft” this is a fine example of an ambition that is both affordable and achievable. Indeed, if you do it for charity you may be able to it free. A wise choice, if that’s the type of activity you believe you can proudly say you have done. So, all is well at trifter, until you see suggestion number 2. “Dock with the international space station” this is the type of unachievable dribble that is the watermark of modern day insanity. I am not saying that this can not be done if you have a spare £30 million and know a guy at the Plesetsk Cosmodrome but how many of us do. About eight people out of a population 6 billion.

Sporting activities are another stupid goal of the over ambitious nut. Listen, if you are not a professional sportsman in your chosen sport by the age of nineteen you never will be. Scoring the winning touch down at the Super Bowl or banging in that injury time headed winner at the world cup final is out of the question. Please do not waste the ink by including it on the list. The only exception, I can think of, to this is darts. You may wish to consider adding winning the Embassy World Darts Championship at the Lakeside Country Club. Let’s face it, what other sport can you participate in while drinking lager from a pint tumbler and polishing of two decks of free sponsor supplied smokes. It is, after all, sponsored by smokes and most former title holders are over weight, pie eating forty some things like my darts hero John “Jockey” Wilson in 1989. So if you wish to list “Win the Embassy World Darts Championship” to your chart, be my guest.

Try avoiding any political ambition or becoming a high ranking member of the monarchy. Kings and Queens are usually picked before birth by divine selection of god himself. It usually can be difficult to sway the decisions of the almighty himself after he has made his mind up. Being a monarch is over rated anyway, imagine having to pose for the drawings on stamps everyday and your subjects not wanting your passport any more as trading it in for an Irish equivalent usually means those subjects will be a the back of the queue for execution by Jihad terrorists on a hijacked plane. Also who wants to be treated like a princess by their boyfriend nowadays anyways? He gets pissed and crashes the car at 155mph in a tunnel, doesn’t sound like much fun to me. Monarchy ambitions are best left alone.

Obscure and weird things I do however endorse, when thinking of activities to add to the list. There was a weird program on, the ever fun, channel four in the United Kingdom called “99 things to do before you die”. These guys new exactly what they were doing. No wannabe astronauts or soccer stars here. One of the contenders from there list was “drink moonshine with American hillbillies”. Is that not a fantastic ambition? Let’s go into the Deep South and sit on a slack jawed, straw hat wearing hillbilly’s porch and booze up on his finest moonshine. I do think it would be wise to let a loved one know where you are going first though. There may be a danger of waking in the hillbilly’s basement bound and gagged and being renamed “Gimp boy”. The presenter, Welsh “Super Shagger”, Steve Jones actually did this, after hallucinating for several hours, Steve vomited and passed out, if I can recollect this correctly. My favourite from their list though, had to be, “model for an agony aunt photo story”. I am unsure if the agony aunt photo story is confined to the British tabloid but if you are unfamiliar with them I have include a photo for you benefit. I like this because it such an extraordinary idea and over weight, beetroot faced presenter Rob, actually did this and can keep the paper to show his grandchildren. Is that not what ambition and achievement is all about?

I also have a list of my own but no outlandish or ostentatious ambitions are included. Only some of the things I would like to do in my life before I myself depart.

1. Run a marathon: What is the most challenging thing about completing a twenty six mile run. Well apart from the year long, relentless and physically demanding exhaustion house of a training schedule, for me it’s where to participate. The obvious choice would be London. The most prestigious of marathons without doubt and would kill two birds with one stone (see below). For me that is a bit too cliché, “I ran the London Marathon” and there is the added danger of stepping in the waste of the women’s world record holder Paula “pooping” Radcliffe. No, I would rather run a more obscure choice of Marathon such as the Minsk Marathon. As well as being able to compete in the challenge of the marathon itself, it would also allow me so see the wonders of Belarus.
2. Visit London: You almost live there but you never visit. I really should go see London. It is after all only “Down the Road”. It must be amongst the most famous and historical cities in the world. Being so close I promise to visit before I die.
3. Get a boat: This may seem ridiculous to some but it is something I have always wanted. I don’t mean a large power cruiser or 300 ft pleasure boat or anything out of my price range, which is everything with my pending divorce, though, after a lottery win you couldn’t keep my arse out of Prossers. Just a little power/jet boat would do.
4. See the Great Pyramid of Giza: This is something that everyone needs to see including me. A massive stone building built by slaves 6,000 years ago must be worth the admission price.
5. Go to a world cup finals: Unfortunately, if my country doesn’t qualify it will be 12 years since they have and the prospects of them qualifying before I die will dwindle like my own centre forward ambitions. Though, I remain ever hopeful of attending to watch my own country participate, I will go, just to be apart from the spectacle and to “savour the atmosphere” which I have heard can be rather unsavoury around the fan camp site. My memories of France 98 and false memories of Argentina 78 are for ever imprinted in my mind and I would like to live that dream.
6. Get a motorcycle/motorcycle licence: I think everyone should be able to ride a motorcycle and have owned at least one motorcycle at some point in their life. I have unfortunately never owned a bike though have been on many as a child and gone on automatic scooters round the sunny roads of the Med countries and an island of the Aegean. Though the image of a large chopper enters the mind of most, I am more partial to a Japanese super bike and the paraphernalia that goes with it. The image, the helmet, the jacket, the boots and the women on the back.
7. Stand on and crush to death a venomous spider. I hate those things. Black widows, red backs, funnel webs the list goes on. I would like to stand on one and kill it. That way it could never climb into a sleeping baby’s bed and bite the infant to death. That way I would have saved a child’s live by proxy.
8. Get the tape of me on the “Untied Shoe Laces Show” filmed in 1984 from the BBC archives: I appeared on this show and was interviewed in some depth by man of the time “Tiger” Tim Stevens. Granted, I was 5 years old and dressed as Friar Tuck from Robin Hood but still regret everyday recording over the Betamax tape it was stored on.
9. Have an affair with an older woman: which subsequently has become with the progression of time, have an affair with a younger women. When this ambition was conceived I was nineteen and the older women was a 30 something mature stunner. Now I am thirty something, I want to go back to the nineteen year olds as I have discovered thirty somethings are just moans who “what a meaningful relationship” and struggle to keep the skin around the eyes from falling off the bone.
10. Have a look through one of those massive optical telescopes at the top of a hill: I must inform you that I am not an astronomer and I do not want to see an image from the telescope on a screen and I do not want to see a printed picture from the telescope. I want to put my eye against the big eye piece and actually look and point it at, what I want to look at. I would point it down the hill and watch extremely closely what the people in the local town were up to.

I hope you have enjoyed my list and I have in some way encouraged you to either run off and make a list of your own or go and tart up a list you already had before reading this blog.