Kicking the Bucket (List)

for Hastings Independent Press

Kicking the Bucket List

By Kent barker

It being the season when one is supposed to set some improving targets for the coming year, I’ve decided to buck the trend. Not, of course that I have anything to fear from scrutiny of last year’s resolutions.  No, I have a clear conscience – largely because I didn’t make any.  I never do.  Why set yourself up for failure, I say.

So let’s gaze on a broader canvass.  How about creating a bucket list?  For the uninitiated that’s things you plan to do before you kick the proverbial.  You know the sort of items; visit the Taj Mahal or climb Everest.  Though in my case getting up the East Hill is tricky enough these days and why travel 4,273 miles to Agra when there’s a perfectly good Taj in St Leonards?

I wonder if I am alone in finding the Bucket List rather constraining? I mean I don’t want to feel I have to go to Finland to see the Northern Lights this winter, or to the Burning Man Festival in Nevada this summer just because they are on the list.  And how would you feel if you only made it half way through before you popped your clogs?  Pretty sick I’ll be bound.

So, instead, I thought I’d look back at the random things I have done in the past couple of years.  Things that I’d never, in my wildest dreams, imagined I’d do. Like performing in a Café Theater group or playing the Ukelele at a gig at my local pub. Unlike Hastings where there is a plethora of good bands most nights, out here in the sticks we only get a session about once a month.  But they are generally excellent with Buick 6 and the Blue Devils being regulars.  So for them to book our rather ramshackle Uke ensemble is a bit intimidating. 

Among us are a couple of very good musicians, a number of pretty good ones, a rump of competent players … and me. I think it may be because I so evidently enjoy playing that they haven’t the heart to chuck me out.  But while they are tunefully finger picking and plucking, I’m still trying to work out how to get from C to G. 

Arthur Rubenstein, when asked how to get to Carnegie Hall, apocryphally replied, “Practice, practice, practice”. The same probably holds good for me for the Bull at Benenden.