To experience
See Vienna Teng play live August 2010
Drink bubble tea
Eat sushi
Find a flint arrowhead
Take part in a Japanese tea ceremony
Feel an earthquake 27.02.10, Chile
Have a bath while the shower's going - so I can pretend I'm having a bath outside in the rain 24.07.10
Listen to the shipping forecast on a stormy night December 2013, gale force winds and a power cut
Visit a ghost tube station (not just see one from the train) Aldwych 26.11.11
Go right round the Circle Line
Run up a down-escalator Alberquerque airport!
Slice open a watermelon as big as my torso with a machete and have a watermelon party 2014.07.30
Drive one of those huge trucks or earth moving machinery
Catch a firefly in a jam-jar
See the Space Station pass overhead
Go to a real ceilidh 14.04.2010
Have a paper plane throwing competition 09.07.2013
Have a massage
Streak
Have a wild animal sit on me (something like a meerkat, or a koala using me as a tree)
Ride a Vespa scooter
Tame a wild creature
Swing on a swing hung from a tree branch in a peaceful wood or meadow
Have a big bonfire of old school/uni notes 27.11.2010
Cook damper on a campfire again
Abseil 14.11.2016 Canyoning in the Azores, abseiled down 10m and 20m waterfalls
Walk over a rope bridge across a ravine 23.04.2016 Iya Valley vine bridge, Shikoku, Japan
Volunteer on an archeological dig
Photocopy my bum
Find a four leaf clover May 2013
Get rickrolled
Sleep in a tent when it's snowing outside
Bob for apples on Hallowe'en 31.10.2012
Exchange mix-tapes (I'm counting mix CDs)
Eat jello salad
Be weightless for a moment
Take part in a flash mob 13.10.2012 ATS flash mob in London, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5hAR95jMOU
Try s'mores
Paddle in the sea when it is snowing
Attend a kite-flying festival
Read a Mills & Boon novel
Smash up an old computer/TV or other big thing with a sledgehammer
Be an extra in a low-budget zombie movie
Touch the stones of Stonehenge
Be a life model for a stranger or an art class
Install Linux
Eat a potato chip sandwich
Eat a PBJ May 2013, not that nice...
Get on the bus to World's End and see where it goes 16.06.10
Correct a grocer's apostrophe on a public sign 2017.04.15, Seashells Tearoom, Starcross (Teas and Cakes, not Tea's and Cake's!)
Shower under a waterfall 20.10.2013 Kuang Si Falls, Laos
Sleep under the stars
Extract my DNA
Rub someone's beard (like in the Hera video)
Say "Leeloo Dallas Multipass!" when I show someone my entry card
Swing fire poi
Have a wall that I can paint anything I like on and make the most of it
Live without electricity or modern inventions for a week
Milk an animal
Spend a night in a treehouse
See a cloud that really truly looks like something else 11.07.12 Seal in the sky!
Go up in a microlight and take the controls
Have a fish pedicure from Garra Rufa fish
Wake up in the night and go out alone for a walk rather than go back to sleep
Sleep on the roof 19.07.2013 at Mum's
Build and sleep in a blanket fort December 2011
Go wild swimming June 2014 (Buckstones Jum and Grasmere in the Lakes, also Llyn Idwal in Snowdonia, a pool in Laos, the River Kwai and a billabong in Australia)
Drink rainwater
Edit wikipedia February 2011
Go ice skating on a frozen river or lake
Ride a segway 16.09.2013 Wheeeeee!
Write a personal mission statement December 2011, "Make life an adventure"
Sleep in a hammock 13.07.2013 in mum's garden with Nick and Tim
Say thank you to someone who fought in one of the World Wars
Spend a whole day barefoot (when I have to go outside, to work, etc) 16.04.2013 Walked 7km through London to work and went home on the tube
Spend a whole day outside (not going in for anything)
Spend a whole day without clothes
Go rock climbing
Find and photograph hearts in the world
Puddle stomp in wellies
Ask 20 people to recommend books and read them all
Sleep in a teepee or yurt
Sleep in a lighthouse
Have a sauna and jump in the snow afterwards February 2014, Kiruna, Sweden
Have my picture painted
Camp on a beach
Swim with dolphins 2015.05.16 Swam out with Nick and a whole pod of dolphins came to swim round us
Ride a camel
Ride an elephant 22.10.2013 Laos, 23.10.2013 Laos and 24.11.2013 Thailand
See a ballet
See an opera 28.05.12 Madame Butterfly at the ENO, it was incredible!
Do the Yorkshire Three Peaks challenge
Do the Three Peaks Challenge
Fly a paper plane off a really tall building
Pinpoint with the naked eye the patches of sky where my quasars are
See a play set in a real Greek or Roman amphitheatre
Swim in the rain June 2011
See the Domesday book
Attend a masked ball
Chase a thunderstorm
Run a 5km race in less than 30 minutes 09.07.11, Hampstead Heath Parkrun, 27 minutes 35 seconds
Do a sprint-distance triathlon
See a laser guide star working
Go to a 24-hour supermarket in the early hours wearing PJs
Sleep in a tree tent
Visit a vibrant night market
Pick tea leaves and have a cuppa
Make chocolate from raw cocoa beans 2014.10.21 with Nick, and it tasted surprisingly nice!
Camp out of top of a mountain and see the sunset and sunrise
Break the ice and go for a swim 2017.01.30 in the wilderness north of Kurravaara in Arctic Sweden, with Nick. We had to saw through 0.5m ice, the air temperature was -6C and the water about 1C.
Ride a bike or run into a big flock of birds
Go for a ride in a sea tractor
Walk a long-distance trail (at least a month)
Tap maple syrup
Try dragon boating
Twirl around in a sunflower field
Do something to help save an endangered species
Swim in a bog
Forge meteorite
TP something
Go up a tall tree
Swim under a full moon
Have a microadventure (go out on an adventure straight after work and return to work the next morning without having gone home)
With friends or family
Have a midnight picnic
Have an old-fashioned tea party
Enter the Rother Raft Race (or some other raft race) - obviously dressed as Daisy of the Eels
Go through a car wash 30.12.2010
Have a barbeque on the beach at night, like I remember from being a kid
Nightswimming (I've been swimming at night and skinny dipping outside, but never both at once)
See a tv marathon of some show Spaced marathon with Tim, Pete and Matt
Toast marshmallows over a campfire September 2009, with Hyejeon
Hide from someone I don't want to see in a busy public place like a supermarket
Go disco bowling/roller skating 18.07.2013, with Tim, Matt and Nick
Sing karaoke February 2013
Build an awesome treehouse
Build and play with a Calvin-and-Hobbes-style go-kart
Finish a cheesy choreography and teach it to someone else, so we can make fools of ourselves together
Have a proper office chair battle May 2009
Send, receive or be a gorilla-gram
Go swimming in the sea on Christmas Day, complete with Santa hat or reindeer antlers 25.12.2014 with Mum at Durdle Door
Watch some Star Trek, probably "Wrath of Khan"
Play Calvinball 2014.08.02 with Nick and Tim
Ride a tandem
Teach a kid how to blow dandelion clocks, whistle on grass blades, make daisy chains, pop fuchsia buds and make catapults from plantains
Teach someone to high five
Go in a hot air balloon
Be brought frozen yoghurt and dance in a laundromat
Be serenaded or serenade someone
Be boombox serenaded or boombox serenade someone
Play spin-the-bottle
Play Truth or Dare
Go to a drive-in movie
Mud-or jelly-wrestling
Have a mud bath
Make out in the backseat of a bus or in the back of a cinema Both on the same day, 31st October 2011 seeing Ghostbusters with Nick
Play Katamari Damacy 08.03.10
Have a food fight
Have a spontaneous finger-gun battle involving at least three people
Dogpile
Do a Chinese fire-drill with at least four people
Hold a baby 2013.12.01 Nibling Sophie
Create a new tradition
Make a coke and mentos fountain 2014.11.27
Wear someone else's clothes right down to the skin
Send someone a home-made valentines card 2018.02.12
Play hide and seek as a grown-up January 2013, at Elton House in Bath with Pete, Matt and Tim
Attend a festival EMF, 31.08.12 - 02.09.12
Use a cheesy chat-up line on someone
Catch some food in my mouth 30.11.2012
Be part of a big, spontaneous group hug
Hold a big themed party
Give Tim a dinosaur-themed birthday party
Go on a treasure hunt
Hold a Midsummer Night's Dream party in a forest
Lie on a car next to an airport and get buzzed by the planes, like in Wayne's World
Try sea kayaking October 2013, Ha Long Bay, Vietnam
Go to an open air cinema August 2011, Somerset House
Sit out singing with a group of friends at dusk or nighttime, preferably with a guitar
Order a pizza to a remote and unlikely location
See the Thames barrier closed during the yearly test with Tim 09.10.11 with Tim and Nick
Go on a barge holiday, maybe along the Kennet and Avon canal
Have a picnic breakfast 27.06.2013
Eat at a dessert-only restaurant
Join someone's freckles up with a marker pen March 2013, Nick was very patient
Do something as spontaneous as suddenly deciding to go abroad and leaving that day
Put a padlock on the Pont Des Artes in Paris 13.01.2013 with Nick
Go to a bed showroom and try out the beds by cuddling on them January 2014 with Nick
Go on a full moon hike
To create
Write a book
Paint a picture on a canvas (I have one in mind, but don't know whether it'll work)
Write the cute C program I've been planning for ages
Have a scientific paper published Finally published January 2010
Make a jumper or other useful garment from scratch
Make 1000 origami cranes
Graffiti something (responsibly - something as artistic and non-controversial as possible, on an ugly bit of modern public property)
Make a short video "A girl for all seasons", January-February 2010, won an award April 2010
Plant a veggie garden
Plant as many trees as possible
Grow a sunflower as tall as me
Make lemonade
Sew a patchwork quilt
Make my own prayer flags
Make a gingerbread house December 2010
Make my mark in wet cement August 2011
Make and eat nettle soup 01.05.10
Take photos of a tree over a year and make into a video
Be involved in a small drama production, either as a techie, or as an actor (I fancy playing Yitzhak from Hedwig)
Write a song
Make a bento box 28.01.11 The Little Prince
Make a mobile
Make an elaborate pancake (eg. tiger-shaped) 21.02.2012
Make pizza in a homemade pizza oven 27.08.2013 Took 13 months, slowest fast food ever
Make and use a pinhole camera March 2014
Try a polaroid camera
Use and develop 35mm film in a darkroom
Carve a wooden fish windcock like Alpha's from Yokahama Kaidashi Kikou
Make a kite and fly it
Make floating lanterns and hold a ceremony
Create an alphabet from photographs of objects which look like letters
Grow woad and dye wool with it
Make a rock balance sculpture Pololu Beach, Hawai'i, May 2011
Make paper 2014.05.27
Make and release floating walnut shell candles
Try making a dorodango (polished ball of mud)
Make the Super Epic Rainbow cake, or rainbow cupcakes 07.02.11 Super Epic Dark Side of the Rainbow Cake
Create an altered book
Knit an Afghan throw or blanket
Recreate exactly a photo of me as a kid
Make fortune cookies
Embroider a map
Make my own Yoda PJs
Make a windchime
Make a map of found objects tied to a piece of string in the order they were found
Make my own poi
Knit graffiti (yarnbomb)
Eat something I've grown myself from seed
Build a coracle and row it across a river/lake
Build a cabin
Take pictures in space with a balloon camera
Climb a tree and take a photo of the view
Enter a photography competition
Plant a secret garden
Create my own font
Build a Rube Goldberg machine
Try playing the theramin
To learn
Tribal belly dance
Poi spinning
More about Philosophy
Flint-knapping
How to make one or two cool origami things, including a paper tiger, stars, lotus, frog
To sing enough in tune that I don't make myself cringe (others will have to take their chances)
How to say the most important ten or so phrases in lots of different languages
A little bit of ballroom dancing
A bit of Charleston
How to leapfrog
To read the clouds
How to tell stories well
To make fire with only a flint and steel or a fire drill
The positions of some of the major stars/galaxies like people always expect from an astronomer
Crochet, or maybe fancier knitting that the absolute basic stitch
About the "seven stories" which are repeated again and again
To juggle with three balls
To skim stones (first stone skimmed January 2012)
To weld
Semaphore
Morse code
How to wiggle all my toes individually
How to mount and dismount a bicycle in that elegant way that old ladies do
How to understand the phonetic alphabet
To play the ukulele (I'll count this as done when I can play Moon River, though now I also want to learn Mele Kelikimaka, Norwegian Wood, Idioteque and Blue Caravan)
How to solve a rubik's cube
How to whistle on my fingers
Chop wood with an axe March 2011
Learn to identify the common British trees
Learn and perform a traditional dance (in costume) from each continent
Learn at least three poems by heart April 2014 (Jabberwocky by Lewis Caroll, Sea Fever by John Masefield and The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost)
Learn to write with my left hand
Learn to sail a small sailing boat solo
How to drum (hand drumming)
The NATO phonetic alphabet November 2010
The Greek alphabet January 2014
Star navigation
Learn to cartwheel
Learn to play a few songs on the piano (Omoide wa Tooku no Hibi by Tenmon, relearn Watermark by Enya)
Learn Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights dance and do it on the Yorkshire Moors in a floaty dress
Learn a well-known choreography (eg. Thriller, or Garth's "Foxy" dance)
Learn to jive
Learn another language properly
Miscellaneous travel goals
Visit every continent in the world (Just Antarctica left now)
Make an ocean voyage in a sailing ship
Swim in every ocean (Atlantic and Pacific only so far, need Indian, Arctic and Antarctic)
Go on a camping trip in a two-person Canadian canoe or kayak
Hitch a lift on an airport golf cart
Help to build and then sleep inside an igloo 2017.02.04 with Nick, near Kiruna in Arctic Sweden. It was technically a quinzee, and I called it the Igelkottage.
Straddle the equator
Be so far out at sea that no land is visible
Travel on a cargo ship across an ocean
Trek through a huge wood/rainforest
Visit a concentration camp (possibly Auschwitz)
Walk through a ghost town 07.04.12 Imber on Salisbury Plain, 19.05.12 Tyneham on the Dorset Coast
Visit one country for every year I'm alive (My
39th country Latvia visited 2018.03.04, but I intend to maintain this)
Circumnavigate the globe
Walk from the sea to the top of a mountain in a day
Be North of the Arctic Circle 4-10.02.2014, Kiruna, Sweden
Stay on an island alone or with someone special
Throw boiling water in the air and have it explode (needs to be somewhere very cold)!
Visit somewhere with my name, such as Bad Ems in Germany
Hear singing sand
Kayaking at night
Live long enough in a country with wet and dry seasons to see them change
Cross a whole country on foot or by bike
Places I want to visit in the UK
Goonhilly, before it closes
Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh 01.07.12 Wow! Sunset from Arthur's Seat, incredible.
Kilmartin Glen in Scotland
The Orkney Islands (including Skara Brae) 7-14.09.2016 with Mum
The Giant's Causeway (Northern Ireland) and Fingal's Cave (Scotland)
Climb Snowdon (I've already climbed Scafell Pike and Ben Nevis)
Walk the Ridgeway 20.06.10 - 25.06.10
Walk Hadrian's Wall
Walk Peddar's Way and the Norfolk Coast Path 17-24.05.2013
Visit Sherwood Forest 04.09.2016 with Mum
Find the Blowing Stone near the Uffington White Horse
Visit Holkham beach in Norfolk May 2013
Lindisfarne 04.07.12 - 07.07.12, Wonderful!
Dungeness 18.08.12
Severn Bore (need to get the timing right)
The Seven Sisters and the White Cliffs of Dover 12.05.12 for Seven Sisters and 30.06.12 for White Cliffs. Both lovely.
Have a bath in Bath 20.01.2013, at dusk with snow on the roofs!
Spend a New Year at a Scottish Hogmanay
Swim through Durdle Door 2014.09.19 with Tim
Things I want to see
A wild tiger
An active volcano Hawaii, November/December 2009
The Aurora Borealis August/September 2011 and February 2014
Stand on a glacier September 2011
Walk in a bamboo forest April and May 2016 in Arashiyama, Japan and also 2013 in Vietnam
A submerged village
The green flash at sunset
Bioluminescent ocean (probably Puerto Rico, go swimming and/or kayaking)
Woods and forests from all over the world (so far... European woodlands, Amazon rainforest, temperate rainforest in the Pacific Northest, Australian bush regrowing after fire, jungle and bamboo forest in Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand, the old cedar forest of Yakushima, Japan)
A tornado (and hopefully chase it)
Wild penguins
Wild meerkats
Quicksand
Wild otters
Experience the monsoon
See lava close enough to poke it with a stick
A whirlpool
See rain in the desert, and the desert blooming
An iceberg
Giant kelp
Other countries I want to visit
Antarctica - I've wanted to visit Antarctica for ages. I don't really like the idea of tourism in such an unspoilt place, I'd much rather go as part of a scientific expedition and winter there.
Iceland August/September 2011
Germany, to see the remains of the Berlin Wall 25.08.12 - 28.08.12
Sweden, to visit the Island of Ven (which was Danish and called Hven when Tycho Brahe built his observatories there in the 17th century) September 2010
Ireland
Italy (Venice) 15-18.12.2014 with Nick
Italy (Florence, Rome and Pompeii)
Serbia (Belgrade)
Bosnia, because I've heard the woods there are lovely
France, to see the Carnac Stones
Czech Republic (Prague) 12-14.02.2014 with Nick
Go back to the Netherlands, to see the tulip fields April 2011
Turkey, to see Cappadocia
Go hiking in the Alps and eat strudel
Eat warm raclette cheese in Switzerland or France 12.01.2013
Go to a Christmas market in a European city Bruges, 8-10.12.12
Wear a short dress in a continental city and feel stunning
Cross the Øresund Bridge (Denmark and Sweden)
Go to a Swedish kräftskiva (crayfish party)
Japan, in spring, to see the sakura and the shrines and gardens of Kyoto 10.04.2016-16.05.2016
Climb Mount Fuji, Japan
Vietnam October-November 2013
Cambodia (Angkor Wat) November 2013
Himalayas, to see prayer flags on mountain passes and drink green tea with yak butter (butter tea)
Bhutan
Sri Lanka
Petra, in Jordan
Pagan/Bagan, Burma
Morocco
The Rift Valley in East Africa
Spend a night in the Sahara Desert
Egypt, to see the pyramids at Giza, Luxor and Abu Simbel
Climb Kilimanjaro if I can cope with the altitude
Safari on the Serengeti (Tanzania/Kenya)
Go on a grand American road trip (Grand Canyon, Meteor Crater, petrified forest, etc)
New England in the autumn, to see the leaves turn colour
San Francisco (I will wear a flower in my hair and ride the trolley cars)
Oregon coast (to hunt for glass floats)
Mexico (Chichen Itza) and Guatemala (Tikal)
Niagara Falls (from either side)
Alaska
Take the mail ferry up the coast of Labrador
California (Yosemite National Park, giant redwoods)
Yellowstone National Park (Wyoming, Montana, Idaho)
Swim in a cenote in Mexico
Hike the West Coast Trail
Costa Rica, for the wildlife
Visit a Canadian sugar shack and have a maple lolly made in the snow
Sing Mele Kalikimaka with a ukulele on Mauna Kea at Xmas wearing a santa hat and bikini and have a snowball fight
New Zealand again, to do a hike
Australia again, to see Uluru and a Big Thing
A tiny South Pacific country, such as Vanuatu
Observatories I'd like to visit
Arecibo Observatory, in Puerto Rico
VLA, New Mexico
Parkes, Australia
The telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii
A shuttle launch
Stand in the Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank
...and would it be too much to ask to visit the Moon? Or just to see the Earth from space...
Last modified: 2018.04.14