101 things - the finale!
I finished my 101 Things in 1001 Days challenge on Monday! The last fortnight has involved quite a bit of scurrying to get things done, and we celebrated the last day of it with a bonfire (where I did not symbolically burn the list). Herewith, a long list of all the things I did and didn't do.
1. Grow a lawn.
Done! Though Kevan would like to point out that it was actually he who grew the lawn. I helped!
2. Make a pond.
Done! We dug a hole, put a washing-up bowl in it and filled it with plants and water like Springwatch told us to. I’ve never seen any inhabitants other than woodlice and larvae, but Kevan insists that a frog once visited.
3. Paint a room a different colour.
Not done! You can really get used to white and greyish-green.
4. Grow and eat a courgette.
Done! More than one courgette, too!
5. Figure out somewhere for all my CDs to go.
Not done! In some boxes in the loft does not count.
6. Invite 10 different people to visit (not including small children)*.
Done! I also allowed some small children to visit.
7. Unpack every box of my stuff and declutter where necessary.
Nearly! I unpacked most of them, but one or two linger on.
8. Learn a useful DIY skill.
Not done! DIY is a bit stressful.
9. Audit my t-shirts and find a use for the ones I don’t want to wear any more.
Done! More or less… I removed a lot from the drawer and chopped them up into squares for t-shirt quilt #2. I haven’t actually made said quilt yet, but that was not specified!
10. Clean the bathroom every week for a year.
Not done! Turns out I hate cleaning the bathroom. Oh well, it doesn’t get that dirty anyway.
11. Go to a Sutton Nature Conservation Volunteers event.
Not done! I did do some other local volunteering though.
12. Go swimming in Waddon.
Done! They have a nice leisure centre there, albeit with oblique opening hours.
13. Find where the local library is and join it.
Done! I haven’t used it yet though; the one near my office proved more convenient.
14. Go to all the pubs in Carshalton.
Not done! Alas, I have only been to one. Ewan and I had grand plans to do a Carshalton pub crawl - indeed, I probably told several of you to come to it - but foolishly, we put it off till this year. Not so easy to go to all the pubs now!
15. Register with a doctor.
Done! I have been there once!
16. Register with a dentist.
Done! I have been there twice!
17. Uncover the mysteries of Epsom.
Done! I paid several visits and walked around the town, visited the well where Epsom salts were discovered, and enjoyed the local museum (where I learned about local residents Norman Wisdom and Mrs Beeton).
18. Talk to five people in my street (not including people in shops).
Done! It took a pandemic, but I got there in the end! And weirdly, I have just discovered that the vicar down the road went to the same youth group as me when we were teenagers, so I supposed I'd better go and say hello to him too.
19. Cycle to Croydon.
Done - and now this is about the most exciting thing I can do of a weekend, I’ve done it several times! The cycle ride to West Croydon along the Wandle is surprisingly lovely.
20. Watch five films at the David Lean Cinema.
Done! I’ve been there quite a lot now, actually; hope it’ll re-open in a bit.
21. Crochet a toy.
Done! I went on an evening course and made a rabbit.
22. Crochet a granny square.
Done! I got quite keen on this and spent several months making bright purple and yellow squares, which are… somewhere in the flat.
23. Make a large item of clothing for myself (i.e. not just a hat, scarf or sock)
Done! I finished sewing a dress from a Clothkits pattern on Monday! But some bits of it are back-to-front, so I’m going to have to do it again. We decided I could tick this one off the list as I can at least put the dress on.
24. Knit an item of clothing for Danish God-daughter.
Done! I knitted her a Sinister Cat jumper from one of Marna’s designs. She has probably grown out of it already.
25. Learn the magic loop method.
Done! No actual magic involved.
26. Get my pouffe reupholstered.
Not done! It is still leaking bits of straw, and Croydon God-daughter mocks it when she visits.
27. Get my sewing machine taken away by the charity who send tools to Africa.
Done! It went to Tools For Self-Reliance for an exciting new life. (This was my granny’s nice sewing machine which I couldn’t figure out; I still have my crappy little John Lewis one.)
28. Make something out of wood.
Done! I made a wooden spoon at Glastonbury!
29. Light a fire.
Done! We had a bonfire in the garden on Monday to celebrate the end of the 1001 days, and I built and lit it all by myself.
30. Close the Barclays account I never use.
Not done, oh dear.
31. Work through all the exercises in my German grammar book.
Not done. Another time!
32. Go to a yoga class.
Done! A success story of the 1001 days; I joined the work Friday lunchtime yoga class and went almost every week till we got sent home. I never got any good, but I did quite like it!
33. Go to a life drawing class.
Not done; however, I did go to Putney School of Art and did two terms of evening classes in drawing and painting, so I am awarding myself half a point for effort.
34. Take driving lessons.
Done! I have another one on Sunday! Totally going to smash that parallel parking thing.
35. Do an Excel course.
Done! I did Intermediate Excel at South Thames College.
36. Learn five guitar chords.
Not done! I haven’t been playing the guitar much of late.
37. Do a random course at City Lit.
Done! Something about watercolours - good fun!
38. Find a new drum teacher and take lessons.
Done! Drum Teacher Tom has been a lockdown hero and we had two lessons a week over Zoom for three months until his housemates came back.
39. Learn 5 poems off by heart.
Not done. I spent several weeks learning ‘Ozymandias’, and then I rather gave up. Look on my works, ye mortals, and despair!
40. Learn to identify 15 trees.
Done, and Kevan can verify this one as we went on a walk to the park last week so I could point at all the ones I knew. I did have to include some novelty trees like monkey puzzles and silver birches to make up the numbers though.
41. Make a cake with chickpea water in it.
Done! Turns out I don’t want to use chickpea water as often as I want to eat chickpeas, but I acknowledge its magical powers.
42. Make some jam.
Done! I made cherry jam a couple of weeks ago; quite good.
43. Make seitan.
Done! I did this at the weekend. Now I know quite how much soy sauce and vegetable stock cubes are involved, I’m not sure I should make this again… it was quite nice though.
44. Make 5 recipes from each cookbook on my shelf. If I can’t find 5 things I want to make, take the book to a charity shop.
Er… done? I think the idea was to make me use my recipe books rather than just cutting things out of the Guardian or looking up recipes on the internet. I’ve cooked at least a few things from most of them now, and the others are a bit too grubby to re-sell.
45. Go to the Eritrean restaurant near Clapham Junction.
Not done - it closed down!
46. Go to an Ethiopian restaurant with Sonja.
Not done! Despite several hints that I would like to do such a thing! Tut, Sonja
47. Try three other cuisines I don’t know.
Sigh… I don’t think I did this. I had Persian and Caribbean food on a Croydon Fun Weekend, but I can’t think of anything else really unfamiliar that I ate. I mean, I never used to eat out that much anyway, but still - poor effort!
48. Go vegan for a month.
Done! Egg noodles were the main problem.
49. Give up alcohol for a month.
Done! I think I did this twice, actually. Not that two months off in slightly under three years is anything to boast about.
50. Give up caffeine for a week.
Done! I did this last week; seemed like good timing as life is not exactly strenuous at the moment. The trick is to accidentally start drinking the decaf coffee you’ve bought for the occasion several days before, without noticing.
51. Give up sugar for a week.
Done! I can’t say I enjoyed it.
52. Go to Iceland with Kevan.
Done! We went to Iceland! It was great!
53. Go camping in Denmark.
Not done. I had vague plans to do so this summer, but even if travelling had been easier, I couldn’t quite get my head around the logistics of putting a tent on a plane.
54. Visit friends in Aarhus and Odense.
Done! I visited all my lovely Danish friends in September 2018, and had a really delightful ten days of travelling around the country.
55. Meet up with four UK friends who live outside London.
Done! My adventures took me as far afield as Oxford, Nottingham, High Wycombe and a village in Kent.
56. Make a Twitter bot.
Done! Though again, this was mostly Kevan, with a tiny bit of input from me. We made a bot on cheapbotsdonequick which autogenerated things that Roger Bolton might say on Radio 4’s Feedback, because we are dorks. (“We asked a regular listener to Something Understood to listen to Gardeners' Question Time. They were disappointed.”) Alas, Twitter soon disabled the account for being a bot, so the fun has ended for now.
57. Play an Xbox game.
Done! I played ‘Life Is Strange’ with Kevan and ‘Untitled Goose Game’ by myself.
58. Play 101 board games. (including card games, word games etc).
Done! It did help that a board game cafe opened in Croydon about a month after I’d commenced this list.
59. Back up everything on my computer to a hard drive and then get a new one.
Done! Though I’m still using my old computer to update podcasts and store my music collection. Cool story eh.
60. Apply for a cat.
Not done. If we have any more lockdowns, I am getting a bloody cat.
61. Go on the Olympic park slide.
Done! I went with Jodi and friends! Didn’t really rate the slide, but I enjoyed the view from the top of the tower.
62. Go on a duck bus. something else!**
I went on a cat tram in Japan, that’ll have to do!
63. Go on the underground train at the Post Office Museum.
Done! It was not as exciting as I’d hoped, and pretty expensive, but the existence of the underground mail rail is very cool.
64. Go to Abbey Mills Pumping Station.
Not done. It gets booked up so quickly on Open House Weekend!
65. Go to the German pub in Kennington.
Not done. I don’t even know where this is!
66. Go to the theatre in London.
Done! I went to Richmond Theatre to see ‘Vulcan 9’ (starring Ade Edmondson and Nigel Planer), and to the Bridge Theatre to see ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, and to the Harold Pinter to see Ian McKellen talking about things.
67. Go to a classical music concert.
Done! I went to the Proms with Bec!
68. Go to Sir John Soane’s Museum.
Done! Better than the Post Office museum and the Olympic Park slide!
69. Go to Southall.
Not done. It’s quite far from where I live, but I should have tried anyway.
70. Visit the Heath Robinson museum.
Done! Lots of automata and funny drawings - worth the visit! It’s very small, mind.
71. Walk the Wandle path.
Not done (apart from a few short sections here and there). I intended to do it this summer, as the mouth of the Wandle is near my office and the source is not that far from home, in South Croydon. But I haven’t been to the office since March, so that didn’t happen.
72. Go kayaking.
Done! Lizzy and I kayaked down the Thames! It was fab and I’d recommend it to everyone!
73. Go to the Lewes fireworks.
Not done; logistically challenging when they close off transport links for most of the day, but I'll figure out a way one day.
74. Climb a mountain.
Not done. I would still like to do this.
75. Walk from Rye to Hastings.
Not done. This is the only plan I'm really sore about not achieving; I booked to go to Hastings on my birthday in mid-March and do this walk in reverse, but had to cancel at the last moment for obvious reasons.
76. Go to Dungeness.
Done! We went on a bus from Rye last summer and it was really great.
77. Go up a high thing (e.g. Go Ape or the Brighton zip wire).
Not done. Kevan thinks I should count the Dungeness lighthouse here, but I was thinking of something a bit more intrepid, ideally involving dangling wires.
78. Organise a karaoke trip.
Not done. Sorry, karaoke chums.
79. Go dancing with Goths.
Not done, though not for want of trying. I went to the late-night dance areas at Glastonbury with my Goth chums and wandered around, but by 2 am they hadn't found anything they wanted to dance to and so I went to bed. I think the dancing commenced several hours later. I should probably have factored in my inability to stay up all night when putting this on the list.
80. Go and watch a sports event.
Done! I went to a football match with some people from work! Quite fun!
81. Draw 101 pictures in the 642 Things to Draw book.
Not done - I think I did about three. I think the evening art courses I did have made me less inclined to draw, not more! Sigh.
82. Draw a cartoon.
Not done - see above.
83. Read 10 books from the Classics section.
Let me get my list of books I've read... OK: Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Northanger Abbey, Crime and Punishment, Gulliver's Travels, Animal Farm, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Sorrows of Young Werther... NOOOO! That's only nine! And 'Pride and Prejudice' and 'Animal Farm' were a cheat anyway because I've already read them. Bah, this is disappointing, I thought this one was in the bag. Not done!
84. Perform in a musical group.
Done! I got to be Mark E. Smith at a Fallen Women gig on two occasions. Terrifying and awkward, but also quite thrilling. I've been on the same stage as Brix Smith Start, you know!
85. Give blood 5 times.
Done! My blood has been sent off to several different hospitals and donated to babies! What a strange and brilliant invention.
86. Teach a child of my acquaintance how to do a thing.
Hmm... I am a playworker, not a teacher; I mostly just help children to do the things they already like doing! Me and Croydon God-daughter made paper flowers once and I think I had to look up the instructions first, so I think I will count this as Done!
87. Read a book in French.
Done! I read 'Le Petit Nicolas' by Sempé and Goscinny, which was good fun. Key vocabulary: "Je veux te donner un coup de poing sur le nez".
88. Get an interesting haircut. Or maybe just a haircut.
Done! I got my hair cut short and went completely grey! Given the excitement this caused amongst chums and office colleagues alike, it was quite possibly the most interesting thing I did in 2018.
89. Go to a Quaker meeting.
Not done.
90. Do the Crisis food hygiene course and volunteer as a kitchen assistant.
Done! I'm glad I did this one. I did a proper one-day course in food hygiene, with an exam and everything, and then helped out in the kitchens at a Crisis shelter two Christmas holidays in a row.
91. Apply for 10 jobs.
Not done; I didn't apply for a single one! And whose fault is that, eh. I did take on three new volunteering roles though...
92. Run for 1 kilometre (that seems like enough).
Not done. I can run for about 1 minute; any more and I feel very bad.
93. Go to the Half Moon in Putney.
Done! Lettice and I went to see T'Pau!
94. Make a Christmas pudding (or possibly some mincemeat).
Done! I didn't make a Christmas pudding, but I did make mince pies from scratch.
95. Get some damn curtains in my damn living room, dammit!
Done!
96. Drink the following: bubble tea; dandelion and burdock; a lager shandy, Vimto.
Done! Bubble tea is the only one I'd like to have more often.
97. Make rye bread.
Done!
98. Do a thing with my dad.
Done! I took him to the Royal Festival Hall to see some pianist he likes.
99. Do a thing with my mum.
Done! I took her to the cinema to see 'Little Women'.
100. Try another new sport.
Not done. I didn't try any sports! Unless yoga counts.
101. Secret thing! To be revealed if I actually do it...
Not done! The secret thing was to get a tattoo, but I had to give blood 5 times first before I could take a long enough break for this; by which time I'd gone off the idea. Never mind.
Total: 64 things done; 34 things not done; 3 noble attempts that almost succeeded. Considering I had to abandon all plans for travelling and outdoor adventures four months before the end, that's not bad going really. I just checked Livejournal for my previous 101 things list that I finished in 2010, and I only did 60 things on that! But I wrote that list in my 20s when I was a bit more ambitious.
I'm glad I did this! I still want to do some of the unaccomplished things on this list, and I might start another one in a few years, if I'm in a similarly bored-but-optimistic mindset. Thanks to everyone who helped me do the things!
1. Grow a lawn.
Done! Though Kevan would like to point out that it was actually he who grew the lawn. I helped!
2. Make a pond.
Done! We dug a hole, put a washing-up bowl in it and filled it with plants and water like Springwatch told us to. I’ve never seen any inhabitants other than woodlice and larvae, but Kevan insists that a frog once visited.
3. Paint a room a different colour.
Not done! You can really get used to white and greyish-green.
4. Grow and eat a courgette.
Done! More than one courgette, too!
5. Figure out somewhere for all my CDs to go.
Not done! In some boxes in the loft does not count.
6. Invite 10 different people to visit (not including small children)*.
Done! I also allowed some small children to visit.
7. Unpack every box of my stuff and declutter where necessary.
Nearly! I unpacked most of them, but one or two linger on.
8. Learn a useful DIY skill.
Not done! DIY is a bit stressful.
9. Audit my t-shirts and find a use for the ones I don’t want to wear any more.
Done! More or less… I removed a lot from the drawer and chopped them up into squares for t-shirt quilt #2. I haven’t actually made said quilt yet, but that was not specified!
10. Clean the bathroom every week for a year.
Not done! Turns out I hate cleaning the bathroom. Oh well, it doesn’t get that dirty anyway.
11. Go to a Sutton Nature Conservation Volunteers event.
Not done! I did do some other local volunteering though.
12. Go swimming in Waddon.
Done! They have a nice leisure centre there, albeit with oblique opening hours.
13. Find where the local library is and join it.
Done! I haven’t used it yet though; the one near my office proved more convenient.
14. Go to all the pubs in Carshalton.
Not done! Alas, I have only been to one. Ewan and I had grand plans to do a Carshalton pub crawl - indeed, I probably told several of you to come to it - but foolishly, we put it off till this year. Not so easy to go to all the pubs now!
15. Register with a doctor.
Done! I have been there once!
16. Register with a dentist.
Done! I have been there twice!
17. Uncover the mysteries of Epsom.
Done! I paid several visits and walked around the town, visited the well where Epsom salts were discovered, and enjoyed the local museum (where I learned about local residents Norman Wisdom and Mrs Beeton).
18. Talk to five people in my street (not including people in shops).
Done! It took a pandemic, but I got there in the end! And weirdly, I have just discovered that the vicar down the road went to the same youth group as me when we were teenagers, so I supposed I'd better go and say hello to him too.
19. Cycle to Croydon.
Done - and now this is about the most exciting thing I can do of a weekend, I’ve done it several times! The cycle ride to West Croydon along the Wandle is surprisingly lovely.
20. Watch five films at the David Lean Cinema.
Done! I’ve been there quite a lot now, actually; hope it’ll re-open in a bit.
21. Crochet a toy.
Done! I went on an evening course and made a rabbit.
22. Crochet a granny square.
Done! I got quite keen on this and spent several months making bright purple and yellow squares, which are… somewhere in the flat.
23. Make a large item of clothing for myself (i.e. not just a hat, scarf or sock)
Done! I finished sewing a dress from a Clothkits pattern on Monday! But some bits of it are back-to-front, so I’m going to have to do it again. We decided I could tick this one off the list as I can at least put the dress on.
24. Knit an item of clothing for Danish God-daughter.
Done! I knitted her a Sinister Cat jumper from one of Marna’s designs. She has probably grown out of it already.
25. Learn the magic loop method.
Done! No actual magic involved.
26. Get my pouffe reupholstered.
Not done! It is still leaking bits of straw, and Croydon God-daughter mocks it when she visits.
27. Get my sewing machine taken away by the charity who send tools to Africa.
Done! It went to Tools For Self-Reliance for an exciting new life. (This was my granny’s nice sewing machine which I couldn’t figure out; I still have my crappy little John Lewis one.)
28. Make something out of wood.
Done! I made a wooden spoon at Glastonbury!
29. Light a fire.
Done! We had a bonfire in the garden on Monday to celebrate the end of the 1001 days, and I built and lit it all by myself.
30. Close the Barclays account I never use.
Not done, oh dear.
31. Work through all the exercises in my German grammar book.
Not done. Another time!
32. Go to a yoga class.
Done! A success story of the 1001 days; I joined the work Friday lunchtime yoga class and went almost every week till we got sent home. I never got any good, but I did quite like it!
33. Go to a life drawing class.
Not done; however, I did go to Putney School of Art and did two terms of evening classes in drawing and painting, so I am awarding myself half a point for effort.
34. Take driving lessons.
Done! I have another one on Sunday! Totally going to smash that parallel parking thing.
35. Do an Excel course.
Done! I did Intermediate Excel at South Thames College.
36. Learn five guitar chords.
Not done! I haven’t been playing the guitar much of late.
37. Do a random course at City Lit.
Done! Something about watercolours - good fun!
38. Find a new drum teacher and take lessons.
Done! Drum Teacher Tom has been a lockdown hero and we had two lessons a week over Zoom for three months until his housemates came back.
39. Learn 5 poems off by heart.
Not done. I spent several weeks learning ‘Ozymandias’, and then I rather gave up. Look on my works, ye mortals, and despair!
40. Learn to identify 15 trees.
Done, and Kevan can verify this one as we went on a walk to the park last week so I could point at all the ones I knew. I did have to include some novelty trees like monkey puzzles and silver birches to make up the numbers though.
41. Make a cake with chickpea water in it.
Done! Turns out I don’t want to use chickpea water as often as I want to eat chickpeas, but I acknowledge its magical powers.
42. Make some jam.
Done! I made cherry jam a couple of weeks ago; quite good.
43. Make seitan.
Done! I did this at the weekend. Now I know quite how much soy sauce and vegetable stock cubes are involved, I’m not sure I should make this again… it was quite nice though.
44. Make 5 recipes from each cookbook on my shelf. If I can’t find 5 things I want to make, take the book to a charity shop.
Er… done? I think the idea was to make me use my recipe books rather than just cutting things out of the Guardian or looking up recipes on the internet. I’ve cooked at least a few things from most of them now, and the others are a bit too grubby to re-sell.
45. Go to the Eritrean restaurant near Clapham Junction.
Not done - it closed down!
46. Go to an Ethiopian restaurant with Sonja.
Not done! Despite several hints that I would like to do such a thing! Tut, Sonja
47. Try three other cuisines I don’t know.
Sigh… I don’t think I did this. I had Persian and Caribbean food on a Croydon Fun Weekend, but I can’t think of anything else really unfamiliar that I ate. I mean, I never used to eat out that much anyway, but still - poor effort!
48. Go vegan for a month.
Done! Egg noodles were the main problem.
49. Give up alcohol for a month.
Done! I think I did this twice, actually. Not that two months off in slightly under three years is anything to boast about.
50. Give up caffeine for a week.
Done! I did this last week; seemed like good timing as life is not exactly strenuous at the moment. The trick is to accidentally start drinking the decaf coffee you’ve bought for the occasion several days before, without noticing.
51. Give up sugar for a week.
Done! I can’t say I enjoyed it.
52. Go to Iceland with Kevan.
Done! We went to Iceland! It was great!
53. Go camping in Denmark.
Not done. I had vague plans to do so this summer, but even if travelling had been easier, I couldn’t quite get my head around the logistics of putting a tent on a plane.
54. Visit friends in Aarhus and Odense.
Done! I visited all my lovely Danish friends in September 2018, and had a really delightful ten days of travelling around the country.
55. Meet up with four UK friends who live outside London.
Done! My adventures took me as far afield as Oxford, Nottingham, High Wycombe and a village in Kent.
56. Make a Twitter bot.
Done! Though again, this was mostly Kevan, with a tiny bit of input from me. We made a bot on cheapbotsdonequick which autogenerated things that Roger Bolton might say on Radio 4’s Feedback, because we are dorks. (“We asked a regular listener to Something Understood to listen to Gardeners' Question Time. They were disappointed.”) Alas, Twitter soon disabled the account for being a bot, so the fun has ended for now.
57. Play an Xbox game.
Done! I played ‘Life Is Strange’ with Kevan and ‘Untitled Goose Game’ by myself.
58. Play 101 board games. (including card games, word games etc).
Done! It did help that a board game cafe opened in Croydon about a month after I’d commenced this list.
59. Back up everything on my computer to a hard drive and then get a new one.
Done! Though I’m still using my old computer to update podcasts and store my music collection. Cool story eh.
60. Apply for a cat.
Not done. If we have any more lockdowns, I am getting a bloody cat.
61. Go on the Olympic park slide.
Done! I went with Jodi and friends! Didn’t really rate the slide, but I enjoyed the view from the top of the tower.
62. Go on a duck bus. something else!**
I went on a cat tram in Japan, that’ll have to do!
63. Go on the underground train at the Post Office Museum.
Done! It was not as exciting as I’d hoped, and pretty expensive, but the existence of the underground mail rail is very cool.
64. Go to Abbey Mills Pumping Station.
Not done. It gets booked up so quickly on Open House Weekend!
65. Go to the German pub in Kennington.
Not done. I don’t even know where this is!
66. Go to the theatre in London.
Done! I went to Richmond Theatre to see ‘Vulcan 9’ (starring Ade Edmondson and Nigel Planer), and to the Bridge Theatre to see ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, and to the Harold Pinter to see Ian McKellen talking about things.
67. Go to a classical music concert.
Done! I went to the Proms with Bec!
68. Go to Sir John Soane’s Museum.
Done! Better than the Post Office museum and the Olympic Park slide!
69. Go to Southall.
Not done. It’s quite far from where I live, but I should have tried anyway.
70. Visit the Heath Robinson museum.
Done! Lots of automata and funny drawings - worth the visit! It’s very small, mind.
71. Walk the Wandle path.
Not done (apart from a few short sections here and there). I intended to do it this summer, as the mouth of the Wandle is near my office and the source is not that far from home, in South Croydon. But I haven’t been to the office since March, so that didn’t happen.
72. Go kayaking.
Done! Lizzy and I kayaked down the Thames! It was fab and I’d recommend it to everyone!
73. Go to the Lewes fireworks.
Not done; logistically challenging when they close off transport links for most of the day, but I'll figure out a way one day.
74. Climb a mountain.
Not done. I would still like to do this.
75. Walk from Rye to Hastings.
Not done. This is the only plan I'm really sore about not achieving; I booked to go to Hastings on my birthday in mid-March and do this walk in reverse, but had to cancel at the last moment for obvious reasons.
76. Go to Dungeness.
Done! We went on a bus from Rye last summer and it was really great.
77. Go up a high thing (e.g. Go Ape or the Brighton zip wire).
Not done. Kevan thinks I should count the Dungeness lighthouse here, but I was thinking of something a bit more intrepid, ideally involving dangling wires.
78. Organise a karaoke trip.
Not done. Sorry, karaoke chums.
79. Go dancing with Goths.
Not done, though not for want of trying. I went to the late-night dance areas at Glastonbury with my Goth chums and wandered around, but by 2 am they hadn't found anything they wanted to dance to and so I went to bed. I think the dancing commenced several hours later. I should probably have factored in my inability to stay up all night when putting this on the list.
80. Go and watch a sports event.
Done! I went to a football match with some people from work! Quite fun!
81. Draw 101 pictures in the 642 Things to Draw book.
Not done - I think I did about three. I think the evening art courses I did have made me less inclined to draw, not more! Sigh.
82. Draw a cartoon.
Not done - see above.
83. Read 10 books from the Classics section.
Let me get my list of books I've read... OK: Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Northanger Abbey, Crime and Punishment, Gulliver's Travels, Animal Farm, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Sorrows of Young Werther... NOOOO! That's only nine! And 'Pride and Prejudice' and 'Animal Farm' were a cheat anyway because I've already read them. Bah, this is disappointing, I thought this one was in the bag. Not done!
84. Perform in a musical group.
Done! I got to be Mark E. Smith at a Fallen Women gig on two occasions. Terrifying and awkward, but also quite thrilling. I've been on the same stage as Brix Smith Start, you know!
85. Give blood 5 times.
Done! My blood has been sent off to several different hospitals and donated to babies! What a strange and brilliant invention.
86. Teach a child of my acquaintance how to do a thing.
Hmm... I am a playworker, not a teacher; I mostly just help children to do the things they already like doing! Me and Croydon God-daughter made paper flowers once and I think I had to look up the instructions first, so I think I will count this as Done!
87. Read a book in French.
Done! I read 'Le Petit Nicolas' by Sempé and Goscinny, which was good fun. Key vocabulary: "Je veux te donner un coup de poing sur le nez".
88. Get an interesting haircut. Or maybe just a haircut.
Done! I got my hair cut short and went completely grey! Given the excitement this caused amongst chums and office colleagues alike, it was quite possibly the most interesting thing I did in 2018.
89. Go to a Quaker meeting.
Not done.
90. Do the Crisis food hygiene course and volunteer as a kitchen assistant.
Done! I'm glad I did this one. I did a proper one-day course in food hygiene, with an exam and everything, and then helped out in the kitchens at a Crisis shelter two Christmas holidays in a row.
91. Apply for 10 jobs.
Not done; I didn't apply for a single one! And whose fault is that, eh. I did take on three new volunteering roles though...
92. Run for 1 kilometre (that seems like enough).
Not done. I can run for about 1 minute; any more and I feel very bad.
93. Go to the Half Moon in Putney.
Done! Lettice and I went to see T'Pau!
94. Make a Christmas pudding (or possibly some mincemeat).
Done! I didn't make a Christmas pudding, but I did make mince pies from scratch.
95. Get some damn curtains in my damn living room, dammit!
Done!
96. Drink the following: bubble tea; dandelion and burdock; a lager shandy, Vimto.
Done! Bubble tea is the only one I'd like to have more often.
97. Make rye bread.
Done!
98. Do a thing with my dad.
Done! I took him to the Royal Festival Hall to see some pianist he likes.
99. Do a thing with my mum.
Done! I took her to the cinema to see 'Little Women'.
100. Try another new sport.
Not done. I didn't try any sports! Unless yoga counts.
101. Secret thing! To be revealed if I actually do it...
Not done! The secret thing was to get a tattoo, but I had to give blood 5 times first before I could take a long enough break for this; by which time I'd gone off the idea. Never mind.
Total: 64 things done; 34 things not done; 3 noble attempts that almost succeeded. Considering I had to abandon all plans for travelling and outdoor adventures four months before the end, that's not bad going really. I just checked Livejournal for my previous 101 things list that I finished in 2010, and I only did 60 things on that! But I wrote that list in my 20s when I was a bit more ambitious.
I'm glad I did this! I still want to do some of the unaccomplished things on this list, and I might start another one in a few years, if I'm in a similarly bored-but-optimistic mindset. Thanks to everyone who helped me do the things!