Laura Davis: The lists are endless – so I’m not even going to start one

Oct 8 2008 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

I AM beginning to feel my life is being swamped by more lists than you find in a Nick Hornby novel – so many, in fact, that I’m soon going to have to write another list to remember them all.

There’s the one of things still to be done on the house, another of everything I should really get around to achieving, shopping lists of things I have to buy (food, cleaning products) and those I mustn’t under any circumstances, no matter how tempted I feel (Vivienne Westwood pearl necklace, large bar of Green & Blacks).

There’s the list of books I want to read, the number of different ways it’s possible to sprain an ankle (on the steps of a 16th-century French chateau being the most recent), preparations for my best friend’s birthday weekend in Bergamo, Biennial exhibitions I intend to visit . . .

Committing these to paper is tempting fate in a pre-empting failure sort of way – so, instead, they lurk in my sub-conscious, emitting a guilty twinge every so often when I choose to go for a glass of wine with colleagues over starting my prize-winning novel.

So I can’t understand why people would make up lists just for the pleasurable experience of writing one, yet, earlier this week, I was using the office photocopier when I was accosted by a colleague from the sports department.

“Have you written your list of top 10 Oasis songs?” he demanded, pointing out his music blog where 22 people had submitted their own catalogues of favourite works.

That’s 22 people who took time out of their day to ponder the intricate differences between Live Forever and Don’t Look Back in Anger when they could have been considering the meaning of life or discussing how awful Jude Law is going to be as Doctor Watson in the new Sherlock Holmes film.

And it’s such a hard thing to judge anyway. I understand how you might be able to pick out a single favourite or even a top three – the songs that heighten your senses or remind you of a special moment – but 10? From the same band? And then rank them in order?

That’s got to be more difficult to come up with than the US Finance Rescue Bill.

Is it a logical process, I wonder? Have they weighed up the melodic quality of riffs in Slide Away against those in Wonderwall or measured how much faster their pulses beat when they’re listening to Supersonic compared to when Some Might Say is blasting out of their iPods?

I would think it’s more of a gut reaction, dependent on so many different variables – current emotional state, how many times you’ve heard a song recently, whether a colleague has been whistling a particularly irritating out-of-tune version – that your opinion would alter day to day.

Judging by the conversation near the photocopier, the process doesn’t end with the completion of the list.

It then has to be debated at length, preferably heatedly and with as many playground-level jibes thrown in as possible, until you all agree to disagree, or someone comes up with another subject for a list.

I very quickly lost the thread of the argument and, like when watching a gangster movie shoot-out, waited for the battle to end before counting the casualties.

It’s said that, if you joined all the blood vessels in a human body from end to end they would wrap around the Earth 18 times, but surely that’s nothing compared to how many times you could wind round all the lists created by the planet’s population in a single day.

I am coming round to the idea of list making for list making’s sake, however, because I’ve realised the one thing that it’s good for.

If I spend my time debating my personal top 10 Steve Martin films, or rating varieties of apple, then I won’t have time to tackle all the boring tasks on the far more significant to-do lists.

ENJOYED this column? Then read more of Laura’s views on life, the universe and nothing at www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk/lauradavis

AND if you really feel compelled to tell the world your personal top 10 Oasis songs, you can at www.peterguy.merseyblogs.co.uk

lauradavis@dailypost.co.uk