Things Not to Do Before You Die

Some activities should really be saved until you're dead. These are just a few of the essential must-nots offered by Guardian books' resident life coach Sam Jordison in his new book
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday September 16 2008 00:07 BST
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Taken for a ride ... A gondolier in Venice. Photograph: Denis Balibouse/Reuters

Sod That! : 103 Things Not to do Before You Die by Sam Jordison Orion Books

Join A Book Club

Book clubs are one of the biggest cultural phenomena of the new millennium. Encouraged by Oprah Winfrey and Richard and Judy, they've sprung up in pubs and sitting rooms around the world faster than mould in a damp bathroom. A 2006 TUC survey even discovered that 91% of employees in Britain would want to join a club if they had the opportunity.

But why go to all that trouble, travel all that way and bake all those cakes just to learn that your friends or colleagues are as wrong about books as they are about everything else?

Ride in a Gondola in Venice

The observant traveller to the beautiful city of Venice will notice two things relating to gondolas. Firstly that no locals will ever go near them. Secondly that at best the gondoliers treat their passengers with haughty disdain and contemptuous silence.

Of course, that's no way to treat anyone, but gondoliers can be forgiven for looking down on anyone foolish enough to procure their services. They know, for a start, that you get a far better, far more comprehensive and far cheaper view of the city if you catch one of the excellent local waterbuses. They know you wish they were singing, but that they won't do it, no matter how much you try to tip them. They know you're trying to make a cheesy cliché the highlight of your life. They also know you've just paid €100 to float around for half an hour on sewage water. In short, they know you're a sucker.

Throw a Dart in a Map and Travel Where it Lands

In the abstract this oft repeated idea promises all the excitement of the unknown. What adventures you might have on your journey to absolutely anywhere!

In reality, it's that 'anywhere' that causes the problem. What if the dart lands in the middle of the Atlantic? Or right next to your house? To throw it again is to admit that you aren't leaving your journey to chance at all. To actually journey somewhere really crap just because a dart told you to do so is the height of idiocy.

If you aim the dart, you're cheating. If you don't aim, it might not even hit the map at all and might well cause an accident. Why not just choose to go somewhere you think you might enjoy instead? And then put your darts to their proper use: fending off Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons and door-to-door salesmen from the comfort of an upstairs room.

Read Ulysses

If you do, as we're all urged, take up James Joyce's overlong magnum opus, it is guaranteed to clog up your all too short life. Banned, criticised and suppressed on moral grounds when it first came out, it thereby became far more famous and far more durable than it would ever have been otherwise. Had it been published openly originally, the book would in all probability have been ignored, or at least gained wider recognition for the pretentious nonsense it is. The lives of generations of English Literature undergraduates the world over would have been considerably eased as a result.

Many readers might experience a strange feeling of guilt at thus disregarding a book that has come to be considered as such an important part of the mythical literary canon. Wading through Ulysses is often regarded as a kind of coming of age. You have to get through it to prove your worth to those invisible cultural arbiters who we imagine sit in judgement of us all. You have to know what happened to Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Dublin on 16 June 1904, even though the answer is, basically, nothing.

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