Category: Time

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William Wilberforce’s Bucket List

The bucket list is a relatively recent concept, being invented by screenwriter Justin Zackham – first with “Justin’s List of Things to Do Before I Kick the Bucket” (1999), and subsequently with the film The Bucket List (2007). But the idea of having goals you want to achieve before you die – well, that has a longer history.

Consider William Wilberforce, for example. In 1787, at the age of about 28, he wrote in his journal that, “God Almighty has set before me two great objects: the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.” (By “manners” he didn’t mean etiquette, but rather the manner of living practiced by society at large – what we might call lifestyle or culture.)

Portrait of William Wilberforce sitting with quill pen in hand at a desk covered in books and papers.

None of this “I want to do a bungee jump, and skydive, and go snorkelling in a tropical resort” stuff for Wilberforce. No, he cut straight to the big stuff: destroy the unethical underpinnings of the global economy, and reform the whole culture he lived in. And having fixed his sights on those goals, he threw everything he had at them.

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Compost Your Enemies

Readers possessed of a better memory than mine may recall the post I wrote 2 1/4 years ago, about the garden patch and what turned out to be a Gestetner stylus found therein. I say a better memory than mine, because I had forgotten that I wrote it.

It refers to an “enormous black bag of weed roots – now too heavy to lift” and when I say enormous, I do not exaggerate. It looked like this:

A large black plastic bag, full, with a white bucket lid on top.
That revolting brown thing is a fallen camellia flower. Why do they do that?

Do not be fooled into thinking that this is your common or garden black rubbish bag, vol. approx 60L. No, no. This black bag was about a metre by two metres when flat, and when full it was, as previously mentioned, too heavy for me to lift. I can lift a ten kilo sack and carry it on my head. In a previous job I used to lift twenty kilo sacks of popping corn (though I was not foolhardy enough to put them on my head). I can lift and carry a large tub full of hardwood logs for the fire. I could not lift this bag.

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Flannel Petticoat II: It Came from the Mending Basket

I recently discovered a fabulous way of reducing the pile of things forming archaeological layers – or possibly new civilizations – in the mending basket. Bin? Absolutely not. Forced labour? Also no. The trick, it turns out, is to shift the goal posts.

The mending basket has got a bit out of hand…

For a ridiculously long time, I have had a flannel nightie in my mending basket, waiting for a mend. Button-bereft garments come and go, elastic waistbands stretch and are replaced, tears are darned or patched, but this was beyond me. The worn-through yoke needed replacing. Did I know how to replace a yoke? No. So I left the nightie in the basket until such time as enlightenment descended.

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