It is rare to read in the newspapers about a 60-year-old librarian, so treasure this moment. The one in question is called Lesley Evans, and last week her birthday wish list seemed to capture the mood of the nation.
Making lists is now very popular. On websites such as Reaperlist.com and Sharebuckets.com you can swap ideas and tell the world how, before you die, you wish to bungee jump with dolphins, swim with the Dalai Lama or run a marathon with Take That (some of those ideas may have been mixed up in translation).
The phenomenon owes its popularity to a 2007 buddy movie, The Bucket List, in which Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman play cancer patients who escape from their grim hospital ward and try to do all the things they want to experience — skydiving, climbing the pyramids, flying over the North Pole, going on safari — before kicking the bucket.
Bucket lists soon began to pop up all over the place, many of them tailored to a particular market. Here is a selection from a discussion of bucket lists on the Cosmopolitan magazine website: “sex for a year”; “skinny dipping”; “swingers’ party”; “have the best sex in the world once a day”; “have sex in an aeroplane toilet”. You’ll have twigged the unifying theme.
But the contribution from Evans, of Sittingbourne, in Kent, stood out from the crowd because, well, let’s just say it didn’t seem all that ambitious. For some people the goal is to climb Everest; for Evans it was to visit Romney and Hythe and take the Dungeness railway to Dungeness. Some wish to see the wonders of the world; Evans hopes to attend a Women’s Institute meeting.
Advertisement
Among the 60 items on her birthday wish list were: visit Lavenham, the Suffolk town famous for its medieval buildings; send an email to Test Match Special; eat squirrel casserole; have a fish pedicure; shake hands with two millionaires; go horse-racing; do bread-making; fire a gun; and do bell-ringing. By last week she had worked her way through 43 of the items.
It’s the very ordinary nature of Evans’s list that makes it so attractive. Many years ago it must have seemed quite adventurous to scale high mountains, pose naked, bungee jump, run marathons or go skydiving.
Now you would struggle to raise any interest even if you went skydiving naked — it’s all been done. These activities are now commonplace — especially anything to do with nudity — which is why more modest ambitions are beginning to strike a chord.
Alice Pyne recently tugged the world’s heartstrings with her rather poignant bucket list. Alice, 15, of Ulverston, in Cumbria, suffers from Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer that affects white blood cells. Encouraged by her mother, she put her own list on a blog, Alice’s Bucket List. She has been swimming with sharks and has already seen Take That, but she also wants to enter her dog in a regional show, to design a mug, to stay in a caravan, to have a back massage and to get something done about her hair.
The great advantage of making an Evans-style list is that you are much more likely to complete the items on it. You will get out of the house, do new things, meet new people. Never mind dolphins; it’s this everyday stuff that can really change your life.
Advertisement
“There was no point in my saying I’d like to go to the Seychelles, and I didn’t want to jump out of planes or go deep-sea diving. They had to be achievable,” says Evans. “The problem with these very exotic things is, you set yourself up for failure. If they’re too complicated, you probably won’t do them.”
Robert Bamberger, 49, of Colchester, in Essex, made his list in the pub at the turn of 2006. At the time, his haberdashery business was coasting and he wasn’t enjoying life. “I was in a rut and not happy with any of the fundamentals,” he says.
Thinking that new experiences might help to cheer him up, he drew up his list with the help of friends over a few drinks. “The idea was that I’d do something, go somewhere, eat something that I’d never done in my life before. And that I’d do one item from the list every two weeks.”
Here are some of the things on his list:
Advertisement
Shortly after making his list, he was invited to a business seminar. “I would normally have regarded that as one step away from having my toenails extracted,” he says. “But I had a space on the list, so I decided to give it a go.
“At the seminar I had a road-to- Damascus moment. I realised I could no longer make excuses and blame everybody else. I came out with a completely different attitude. Back then I was a shopkeeper. Now I regard myself as a businessman. And without that intervention, there’s a good chance that my business would have gone bust.”
So what are you waiting for? Evans has shown the way. There’s no need to be too ambitious. You could start by listing 20 things you’d like to do over the summer. Don’t bother the WI, though: they’ll all be off swimming with dolphins.