Bucket List

It started with a tick!

beckyjo1252 Comments

Saturday 18 June 2022

One week after I post my bucket list… one item is ticked off!

So, have I been skinny dipping? Not yet – but grateful thanks to the person who has offered to join me on that outing! Whisky festival then? Again no, even though this item attracted even more interest from friends and family!

What actually happened was that in the middle of last week, following a month of communication with an educational publisher, submitting, then editing (and re-editing) my ‘assignment’, I signed my first ever freelance agreement as a content writer and invoice no.1 has left my email outbox! Yippedy dee!

If am being honest, when I pictured submitting an ‘article’ to an educational publication, I envisaged a well-researched piece of writing on some topical issue of the day, such as ‘The impact of wealth inequality on the British educational system.’ And that is not what this is at all. My brief is designing learning and assessment resources. And whilst I’d never previously thought of this line of work, I do love it and … they appear to be paying me. So happy, happy days!

All of which leaves me pondering, what to do with my first writing pay cheque? Should I treat the teens? Both my uni girls have worked really hard and passed their recent examinations. Meanwhile at home, Smallboy has made it through 24 GCSE assessments (thankfully only 3 more to go!). So they certainly all deserve a little something. On the other hand … my bucket list was supposed to be about me so should I direct it towards further adventures? Money to pay for the Elevazione oboe part, or start a savings pot for Oktoberfest 2023?

Perhaps, I caution my racing thoughts, I should actually wait for the money to land! Last Friday,I got a fee for an oboe playing gig and they, rather bizarrely, paid me £75 … in Waitrose vouchers, which was an unexpected first and a timely reminder, as the old sages would say, not to count my chickens…

So, in the meantime, it is back to the bucket list and wondering ‘What’s next?’ Well all that writing and editing can take a toll on a busy single mum. I think the sofa, popcorn, a good bottle of wine and ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s sounds like the perfect next step ….

My bucket list!

beckyjo1251 Comment

Saturday 11 June 2022

Bucket lists? Well if you are anything like me, the very mention of the phrase used to conjure up images of slightly balding men in lycra, dangling from the end of a bungee rope, having a mid-life crisis. Definitely not my cup of tea!

So what has changed?

‘The bucket list…’ states a Stanford Medicine article, is ‘‘… a list of things that one has not done before, but wants to do before dying’’.

It’s a definition that left me perplexed. Yes, for years, I really didn’t grasp the notion at all. No procrastination or waiting until the grim reaper came knocking for me. If there was something I wanted to do, I’d pretty much go out and do it. And, busy as a bee, I gallivanted through life: learning, travelling, adventuring, performing, and falling in and out of love. It was.. amazing.

But then came parenthood and … single motherhood-hood. Wonderful as that is too, in so many ways, as I now contemplate ‘empty nesting‘ I realise that the last 20 years has extinguished some of my drive and daring and made me become a little bit invisible in my own life. As a single-mum, because the focus is never on you, I think that I simply forgot, over time, to have any hopes or dreams of my own. I forgot how good it feels to live life to the full, with aspirations for me as well as my children.

So last Summer, as a friend was explaining their creation of a list of ‘60 things to do before I’m sixty’ , it was like a jolt of electricity through my veins. As, she ran through some of the items, with me shouting,

‘Ooh, sounds great!’, ‘Count me in!’

an even more exciting idea was forming. Designing my own schedule of ideas; now that truly was intoxicating and felt like a missing piece of me being slotted back into place. I needed some goals of my own, some challenges to look forward to, some re-invention of my former self. I needed … my own kind of bucket list.

So here we go. It is not ’60 things to do before I’m sixty‘ because after 2 decades of keeping everyone else happy, I did struggle to turn the spotlight in my direction and think about what might make me happy. Instead, it is ten things to do in the next 24 months, which I figure is a good start could snowball into other ideas.

  1. Learn to play the oboe part of Elevazione: Domenico Zipoli
  2. Have a night out at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in Soho
  3. Submit an educational article for publication
  4. Go to a whisky festival
  5. Drink beer at the Oktoberfest
  6. Sign up for German classes
  7. Raise money for The Samaritans
  8. Watch ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s‘
  9. Read Jane Eyre: Jane Austen
  10. Learn to swim underwater

And… as a cheeky extra,

11. Go skinny dipping!

Many wouldn’t appear on anyone else’s ‘to do’ list, but I am pretty confident that they are all things I’d love to do. Little bits of me, reflecting: my values, my passions and my interests, plus in the case of number ten, facing a life-long fear and … I actually cannot wait to get started!