Developing a List

There are many things I am not:

I am NOT a

Or, as you know, a

Both these jobs, I would imagine, require a certain degree of organisation.  For instance, a rocket scientist would need to keep track of what shiny metal bit goes where;  you would need to be sure that you didn't muddle rocket fuel with the wiper fluid, that you hadn't confused Sod's Law with that of Newton's Third.  Lives DEPEND on having the ability to work in a systematic fashion.

Same goes for domestic goddesses...  Well, obviously lives are hardly imperilled if a recipe for a cherry cafloutis isn't followed to the letter but nevertheless, slipshoddery in the old Nigellas can send you down a path made treacherous with  public mortification at the PTA cake stall.

The horror of public mockery

These people need lists.  Lists were developed for exactly this type of person, like Factor VIII for haemophiliacs.  They play an essential role in their day-to-day existence; without lists rockets would drop from the sky and scones fail to rise.  The science of dough management and exothermic chemical reactions hinges on the ability to write stuff down and put it in numerical order.

Now, stand up everybody.  Good.  Right, anybody who is NOT a rocket scientist or a domestic goddess, please sit down.

As I suspected.

For most of us, lists have become an unnecessary feature of our lives like Kerry Katona and pre-grated carrot.  List compilation has become a modern malaise, the crack cocaine of the literate poor.  At first it creeps up on you, pretending to be your friend by boosting confidence, making you more socially acceptable, filling you with the warm feel-good factor of the ordered cognoscenti.  But then after a while you need more to get the same buzz.  You start ordering your iPod (and those of your kids) into playlists, you keep a birthday book AND a calendar. 

Before you know it, you're having people over to admire your new in and out trays.

The problem with lists is that you have to be a List Person for them to work.  Otherwise it's just a half-hearted effort to delay forgetting something.  How many unread shopping lists spew from a groaning glove compartment or tickertape around our ankles every time we pull out a wallet or purse?  Carefully numbered, neatly handwritten lists making sure we don't forget our innate half-wittery along with the semi-skimmed?

As I'm not a rocket scientist OR a domestic goddess it follows that I'm no list writer.  I forget stuff.  Frequently.  But the up-side of this is that getting from A to B can involve going the long way round, the pretty way — meeting up with folk I hadn't planned to, buying things I don't know how to cook, and dreaming up things to write about which weren't in my head this morning.

Without lists, life is just so more... alive. 

If you would like to live a life free of lists, follow this eight-step programme...

1.