Fuck the Bucket List!

Don't tell me you've got one...

Me in my garden taken by my son, Marlon Rouse Tavares

The term Bucket List makes me want to die quicker so that I don’t have to have one! Well, not really but I do detest the term.

Kick the bucket is, of course, another way of saying to die with the added extra of those brutal staccato inflections. According to the Guardian Notes and Queries – ‘MOST etymologists agree that the “bucket” refers to a kind of yoke that was used to hold pigs by their heels so that they could be slaughtered, and was particularly used in parts of Norfolk. The subsequent death-throe spasms of the unfortunate animals created the impression that they were “kicking the bucket”. The derivation is either from Old French buquet (a balance) or the fact that the raising of the yoke on a pulley resembled a bucket being lifted from a well. The term is known to date from at least the 16th century. The more interesting (and probably apochryphal) origin relates to suicides who would stand on a large bucket with noose around the neck and, at the moment of their choosing, would kick away the bucket.’

Kick the bucket is often used in that humorous kind of way about death and frankly I’d never use it. I guess it’s a bit old-fashioned these days too. And it’s avoidant. Pub talk. I mean I feel the same in the other direction about using ‘pass’ or ‘pass on’ to mean die. It’s polite, soft and avoidant.

The Bucket List didn’t have a hope in hell with me. From the start. But goodness me, it’s like a rapidly spreading virus. It is everywhere. Not so long ago, a podcast interviewer asked me what was on my bucket list? My whole body went into revulsion mode. I could not answer that question. I simply said that I don’t have a bucket list and left it at that. What I wanted to say was – ‘I don’t have a bloody bucket list and will never have, it’s an insult to older people, the idea that we should all have a bucket list. Like a wedding list at the other end of life! Well, I didn’t have a wedding so no list, but I will have a death but I’m not ever having a bucket list.’

I guess what irritates me the most is that it is reductive and aspirational at the same time. The idea that you need to have a bucket list in order to live your life to the full as you get older – is ridiculous. I don’t need a list to tick off the achievements, I just want to carry on doing stuff that I like as well having to attend to the stuff that I don’t like ie having to get a different car, a new old car and all the requirements around that.

Reading my poems at a WIP event 2024

I just googled bucket list and found a youngish man who has a website called Location Rebel and he’s an expert bucket lister. This is what he says– ‘Some of the cool stuff I’ve done like drive a Ferrari, smoke a cigar in Cuba, live on a tropical island, dancing in Rio’s Carnival Parade (yes, I am kind of bragging). Why things aren’t as impossible as you think they are. I created my list when I was still in my suit and tie, and some of the things I crossed off seemed crazy at the time.’

Exactly what I’m talking about. Bucket lists have become a part of our neo-liberal, aspirant culture. Adventure has been commodified and blandified out of all recognition. Bucket lists do seem to be predominantly about travel and the places on those lists of horror chime with predictability.

I’m a lover of the eccentric and outsider characters in life. Social media encourages sheepdom and that really gets my goat! We do not all have to do the same thing. In the same way. Because we’ve seen in on Insta or Tik Tok or FB. A little bit of research can lead to having adventures that actually are adventures rather than someone else’s idea of an adventure. The adventure re-hash – no thanks.

In Algiers by Ruby Millington

These days, you can go on the ultimate bucket list journey which is so long that you don’t really need to do the actual travelling. There are guides to the bucket list, steps to how to get to the guide, life stages along the bucket list, therapy to assist you in making your ideal bucket list. Take Annette – another young person and her https://bucketlistjourney.net/my-bucket-list/. You get my drift – bucket lists are big business and that’s before you actually leave the house.

My ultimate objection is that I don’t need a bucket list as a set of goals without which my life will wither and fail. I travel and will continue to travel as long as I am mobile. I have places that I want to return like India, I have new places that I’d love to go to from travelling around West Ireland to the Cote d’Ivoire but those places are part of my ongoingness, I don’t need an official Bucket List to put them on. I’d like to go but if it doesn’t happen, then it doesn’t happen.

I like to meander around in life – it doesn’t mean that I don’t get things done – but I like to be able to relish them, I don’t need to rush around. Spaciousness, yes, that’s on my fictional bucket list. Good friendships that we constantly take the time to nurture. A good relationship with my community whether it’s my local geographical one or the Advantages of Age ones on FB and Substack – they have a high rating. As do – spending rich joyful times with my grandson and son and family. And partner. Plunging my hands in the earth of my precious garden. Getting better at tennis. Being better at apologising and also navigating personal conflict. Being about to be graceful about my vulnerability. Getting a poetry collection out there.

No, that’s not a bucket list. It’s just an everyday list of stuff that I want to do and continue to plod along that path. Oh there’s a lot to be said for plodding…

The Advantages of Age picnic 2025 Hampstead Heath