100 Things to Do Before You Die

I read in one of the fluff columns in the Sunday paper of an Australian woman who is trying to learn to become a Buddhist; part of her training is to live for a year imagining that it is her last. She said that it had quite an affect on her, living this way, and that she was spending a lot more time clearing her wardrobe of things she no longer wore, defragging her computer and generally ‘putting her affairs in order’ as they say in fusty old English dramas. What?? I screeched (in my mind, of course, I'm not a lunatic). As if. As if you would spend the last year of your life on personal admin. I personally would not be wasting my last precious 365 days doing that stuff. As is my wont, I re-pondered this later as I was bottling homemade tomato sauce and inscribing the ingredient list on the label. I thought: that’s because my affairs are already in order. I must be the only person in the whole Sunday-paper-reading public who is sickeningly organised enough not to relate to that story.