Always up for a challenge – so long as it’s cheap

Apr 23 2008 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

HERE’S the quandary: how easy is it to find something to do that you have never done before without there being a very good reason (phobias, morality, maintaining public decency . . .) for you never having attempted it?

I pose this question because this is the task I have set myself to complete once a month for the whole of 2008, and it’s proving to be a lot more difficult than I anticipated.

This is not because I am the sort of person who never turns down an opportunity, no matter how death-defying it may be.

Although, in some of my most self-deceiving moments, I convince myself I would happily cross the Sahara with only a canister of water and a camel, the reality is I would miss my cosy life – half-decorated house, family and friends being close by and bottles of Volvic practically on tap.

I suspect this is nothing unusual – one minute we are dreaming about running away to join the circus and the next we are complaining there is no ready-sliced bloomer in Tesco. Such is the gap between fantasy and reality.

In the Great Quest of 2008, sun-baked deserts do not really come into it. I, and my two trusty companions on this journey out of the Comfort Zone, do not have Richard Branson on speed dial, just in case a seat comes up on his moon shuttle.

We have set too many parameters – mainly financial and time restrictions, plus the fact that we are basically just too chicken – to start leaping out of aeroplanes at Woodvale or diving fathoms beneath the Irish Sea.

So our challenges have to be of a gentler, everyday variety, and therein lies the problem we had overlooked in optimistic January, when the skyscraping mountains of New Year’s resolutions appeared to us as molehills.

With travel abroad and an unlimited budget out of our reach, finding 12 brand spanking new ways of passing the time takes a capacity for imagination greater than that of 27 five-year-olds given only a cardboard box to play with.

In January, we started as we didn’t mean to go on, by counting my birthday party as the First Task Completed. None of us had ever attended a masquerade before and it was fortunate that I was holding one.

Even allowing for the extra day this February, the month came and nearly went before we realised, on the 28th, that we had not yet Done Something New. So we drank cocktails in the bar of the Hard Day’s Night Hotel and went to Late at Tate, convincing ourselves that, although we had visited the hotel before and had definitely sunk a Mojito or two, the two had never coincided.

Feeling guilty at our lack of effort, we headed over to the Tate, which two of us had already been to on many occasions, but never at that particular time in the evening.

March’s effort was even poorer – instead of taking up extreme ironing or eating a potentially poisonous blow fish, we went to Oxton.

So far, it’s been a disaster. Our attempts to broaden our horizons have in reality forced us to do exactly the same thing each month – worry about how we can fulfil the task.

With just one week left in April, the panic has begun to set in again. So far we have come up with (and discredited) the following ideas: trip to the Isle of Man (too cold), trip to Chill Factor (I have a sore back), going to a cathedral carol concert (wrong time of year).

We must not, no matter how great the temptation, try to sneak in an already-planned event on a flimsy excuse – “I’ve never been into WHSmith at five past two on a Wednesday before”, or “If I close my left eye and stand on one leg I’ll get a brand new view of the bus stop at the end of my road”.

But all is not lost. After all, this is the first time I’ve ever written a column with the word “Oxton” in it.

lauradavis@dailypost.co.uk