Recipe For Failure

This week I've been compiling a High Fidelity-style list of Ten Things I Want To Do Before I'm 40. To wit:

1. Resurrect the lost language of the Picts, brilliantly demonstrating it to be a heretofore unknown offshoot of the Finno-Ugric language family. This will require a certain amount of research to be undertaken in Finland; more specifically, in the big Marimekko shop - the one with all the nice trays and wall hangings.

2. Finish Masters degree, submitting brilliant dissertation about kittens and the internet, on the strength of which I will be immediately snapped up as a PhD student by some tip-top educational institution.

3. Write brilliant PhD thesis about knitting and identity, which will immediately propel me into the uppermost echelons of pop culture academia. Write a series of really quite dry and uninteresting academic books that will nevertheless sell like hot cakes thanks to their colourful, glossy covers and witty txt spk titles spelled out in real wool. Around this time I may also coin a fashionable new buzzword.

4. Miraculously become rich enough to afford a house in Ashchurch Grove, London W12, with very big, very clean windows and a lot of wisteria and ivy.

5. Buy a house in Ashchurch Grove, London W12, with very big, very clean windows and a lot of wisteria and ivy. Fill it with really pretentious books, some of which I will have written (see above).

6. Go around being a bit like Germaine Greer, only without all the talking and going on telly and stuff.

7. Purchase a cottage in Cornwall (or similar coastal county), for the sole purpose of observing the sea during stormy weather.

8. Stop smoking.

9. Learn Spanish, Arabic, Welsh and Finnish.

10. Fail to achieve any of the above. At 11.59pm on the 6th October 2010, scratch out "40" and replace with "70".