let's be negative for a moment...

ten things i never want to do or ever do again before i die...

1. listen to dexy's 'come on eileen' again:

one of the most overplayed songs i've ever repeatedly heard - in 1982 i loved it, but after 11 years of playing it ad nauseum at discos with drunken punters barging violently into each other and bawling out 'too-rye-aye' in loud essex accents, it lost its appeal for me...

2. sit through another ballet or any other dance-only performance:

i like a lot of classical ballet music but ballet itself leaves me cold ever since i was made to sit through a performance of giselle at the tender age of nine - and i can only take dance if its part of a musical, a pop video, a film, a variety show, etc...

3. watch lee ang's 'hulk' movie all the way through:

i think he's one of the best film-makers ever - 'the ice storm' and 'run with the devil' are two of my favourite films of the last ten years - but having seen bits of hulk on tv the other night, i feel he's taking his famous eclecticism a bit too far for my liking - like the two spiderman movies, i felt i was watching live action sequences interspersed with bits of a computer game - the x-men special effects were far superior i think...

4. spend more than an hour at a gallery of modern art:

i have mixed feelings about modern art, being a sweeping landscape and light and shade kind of guy - some installations have really captured my imagination, while some exhibits i've seen at the tate modern over the years have both bemused and annoyed me - on a recent visit, k. and i had a very heated exchange over some mondrian paintings and got quite irate with each other (he liked them)

5. sleep in a tent, on a beach, on a railway station platform or in a dormitory of a youth hostel:

like most student backpackers, i've done all of these and hated every uncomfortable, sleepless moment - the lowest point was being stuck in a tent in a field under snowden (north wales) in the rain for two days in the freezing cold, with my friend and i getting more and more irritable with each other - the final nail in the coffin of my 'roughing' experiences happened in my first year of work when i was woken up at two am in the dorm of a youth hostel in bath by the arrival of the hull university snooker b team who preceded to discuss the contents of their porno mags in loud drunken voices - 'i'm earning a wage so why am i still doing this?' i asked myself...

6. share swimming space in an australian creek with freshwater crocodiles:

my guide in kakadu, northern australia suggested a dip in a creek where any remaining saltwater crocodiles left over from the rainy season had been removed - he assured me that the remaining freshwater ones would be more scared of me than i would be of them and that they only ate fish - i had visions of old johnny weissmuller tarzan films where he always seemed to be defending himself, jane and boy, who, unwisely, always seemed to pick the most questionable of bathing locations, by vertically jamming a log into the wide open mouth of an rko stunt croc - i declined to swim, there being no evidence of detachable vegetation around the pool

7. get a job as a car park attendant:

for four years in my teens i spent nearly every sunday afternoon as a car park attendant at my village's only tourist attraction - it was the most boring job i ever had, the endless monotony being only occasionally broken by infrequent collisions, animals runnning under the wheels of reversing vehicles and the odd person falling in the river (the tourist attraction was a water mill)

8. bungee jump:

anyone in the uk who watched saturday teatime tv in the early eighties and saw 'noel edmonds late late breakfast show' will remember the section of the show where a member of the audience was selected each week to train for and perform a dangerous stunt for the next week's show and how the guy selected for the bungee jump stunt was killed during training when he fell from a great height before anybody had attached the rope to the end of the pole - an accident that put me off this particular activity for life, although on the positive side it did prevent noel and his vomit-inducing jumpers from appearing on tv again for many years until he re-emerged with his crinkly-bottom house party - i would still like to give hang-gliding and para-sailing a go...

9. sit sober in a room full of stoned people:

all my friends did it at college - i always declined as the mix of pot and tobacco always gave me a headache - in the light of subsequent experience i can't understand why they never used a bong - its no fun being the only one in a room in a legal state of mind when everyone else is sitting around you bonding and giggling - a bit like childhood experiences when your friends told you that they didn't want you in their gang and you had to watch them having fun and feeling left out...

10. projectile vomit:

the last sydney mardi gras party i went to ended with me impressing a crowd of lesbians so much by the length and accuracy of my hurling that they cheered and applauded each of my five record-breaking attempts to reach the rose bushes outside the dome building at fox studios.....never again.....

11. read beyond 'the fellowship of the ring':

i like 'the hobbit' because it's humourous and easy to read - the first book of 'the lord of the rings' starts off in the same style and i've read it many times in an attempt to read through the whole story - but no matter how many times i've tried, i can't get beyond the first hundred or so pages of 'the two towers' because my boredom with the story increases as the writing begins to change into the portentious, pompous language of an epic saga - thank god for peter jackson...

12. make a list of ten items:

...because you either have more or less than ten, as i discovered when i started compiling my top ten bathtime gurgles iTunes playlists of tracks by my favourite artists...