Julia Roberts changed my life

Funny things, life-changing moments. They can occur anywhere, at any time. From near-death experiences to something as simple as seeing a sunrise, you never know when something will trigger a serious self-evaluation.

The backdrop for my little epiphany was fairly undramatic, to be honest. Taking the advice of a friend, I sat back in my armchair with a nice cold beer to watch Sleeping With The Enemy, a film I had somehow missed until that point. Nothing against Julia Roberts, you understand, I'm just not normally drawn to chick flicks and had always assumed it was one. So, having been assured it was, in fact, a thriller, I got comfortable and prepared to have my mind changed. It was. Then it changed again, in a slightly different direction. It might not be a chick flick, but it is bloody awful.

It's not that there's a major flaw anywhere, it's that there are several small ones. For example, why, when everything else seems to have been very carefully planned, does she decide to dispose of her wedding ring in the toilet? Any idiot could have told her it wasn't going to flush and it didn't, so her husband saw it a few days later and realised he'd been had. Then there's the part where she goes to visit her mother in the nursing home. Dressing as a man, she even dons a fake moustache. “Your own mother wouldn't recognise you”, coos Ben. Of course she wouldn't: she's blind. Plus, Julia Roberts dressed as a man just looks like Julia Roberts dressed as a man. And the cherry on the dog turd is the final scene, where she calls 911, gives the name she recently started using, says she just killed an intruder and shoots her deranged husband. Of course, she and the failed actor will live happily ever after. The police won't be remotely curious about the woman who just moved to town, is known to practically no-one and just shot someone. Oh, and they'll never identify the dead man, discover that he is not a career criminal after all and wonder what he's doing in Nowhere, Iowa. There is absolutely no reason to suspect that she won't get away with it.

I'm not saying he deserved any better than five in the chest, I just don't like the way the film appears to tie everything up nice and neatly, when, in all probability, our heroine is destined to spend the next few years of her life in an orange jumpsuit, before being executed. That probably wouldn't make a great sequel.

And so, while watching the end credits starting to make their way up the screen, I realised something. That was two hours of my life wasted. Of a finite amount of hours available to me, I had just squandered two of them. Couldn't help but find that a little depressing.

But if there's one good thing about wasting part of your life, however small a part, it's that you start to think about things you could do that won't feel like a waste. I've already started on some constructive uses of time, the details of which I won't go into here, but what I haven't started yet is my own bucket list. So. Here goes;

1. BASE jump from the Eiffel Tower. As places to get arrested go, Paris surely ain't bad.
2. Compete in some form of motorsport. I'm thinking hillclimbing, since it is one of the cheapest forms of motorsport and you are, in theory, mostly competing against yourself.
3. Fire a machine gun. What can I say? I'm a man. We don't grow up, we just get bigger, louder, more expensive toys.
4. Punch Justin Bieber. Enough said.
5. Drink a yard of ale. Preferably without almost drowning upon reaching the point of no return (the point when air can finally get into the bowl at the end, allowing a pint or two of ale to surge down the glass like a storm drain in a flash flood).
6. Build something useful. Nothing huge, you understand. Just a car or something. Or maybe some sort of light aircraft.
7. Meet Simon Cowell and ask him how exactly he sleeps at night. Apart from 'on a big pile of money', obviously.
8. Go to Australia and see Uluru, formerly known as Ayers Rock. People who've been there often talk about the rock as if they're Vietnam vets; “You wouldn't understand, man. You weren't there”.
9. See what happens when you microwave a watermelon. It might be a bit immature, but I'll bet it's funny. As long as the microwave is outside. And not my own.
10. HALO. And I don't mean the Xbox games. I mean a High Altitude, Low Open parachute jump. Normally used by the military as a means of getting personnel and equipment into hostile areas from the relatively safe place that is an aircraft at 30 000 feet, civilians now also have the chance to jump out of a perfectly good plane from over five and a half miles up. http://www.incredible-adventures.com/halo-jumping.html#.ToDrAdQlfzM charge what they call a 'special intro price' of $3495 for the experience. To be honest, I'm not convinced these guys are right in the head, but they seem to know what they're talking about. You jump from so high up, you spend time before the jump breathing pure oxygen. Without oxygen, you can expect to be 'usefully conscious' for around thirty seconds. But the thing that interests me about a HALO jump is not the danger (I could black out, or get something similar to the bends, a condition associated with deep sea diving), not even the (up to) two minutes of freefall. The view is bound to be spectacular, of course: from that height you'll probably be able to see the curvature of the earth, but it's not that either. It's the speed. During a normal parachute jump, from much lower altitude, you accelerate at a fairly alarming rate, before reaching terminal velocity, which is when the force of the air resistance equals the force of gravity. You will continue to fall, of course, but you can't fall any faster. Terminal velocity is normally around 125mph. During the early stages of a HALO jump, when the air is much thinner and so drag is greatly reduced, you can expect to reach an initial terminal velocity of more like 250mph, before reaching the thicker air and greater air resistance closer to the ground and slowing to 125mph. Not bad, when you consider that a Bugatti Veyron requires 1000 BHP (Brake Horse Power, for the non-petrol heads among you) to do that sort of speed, whereas you could do it on your own, using no more than ale and pies.

Well, that's a start. I'll no doubt keep adding to it over time, and I'll even have a go at crossing stuff off. And I strongly suspect that my life will be the better for it. And to think: if it hadn't been for a Julia Roberts film, I might never have thought to do any of it.