According to my list, there are 80 things that I did for the first time in 2011. [The observant of you will notice that I counted 79 in Tuesday’s post. I remembered one while writing this one.] In all probability there were more than this, but some would have been too tedious to list (yes, even more tedious than ‘drunk a Corona’) and some – like my trip to Paris – contained multiple firsts that were too numerous to list in their entirety.
Because I’m still a researcher at heart, I’m going to do a little evaluation and comparison with the 2010 list. Checking the 2011 version of this post, I see that I listed 78 2010 Firsts (in the mysteriously named ‘clean’ version) and then classified them according to type. So here’s an evaluation of 2011’s Firsts:
- Again, 14 were food/drink related (it seems I am a creature of habit). I did make a point of noting new places in which I’d eaten, which is an excellent pursuit as it means you remember good places to go.
- Seven were geographical (i.e. new places – towns and suchlike visited).
- Many were cultural (I lost track of what exactly I was counting as ‘cultural’) – museums, BBC recordings, plays, concerts – actually, it was with the latter that I got stuck. A concert at King’s Place was definitely a cultural experience, but was Take That at Wembley?
- There were 13 items in my Firsts for 2011 list. I definitely did four of them and kind of did a couple of others. Some were total failures – I didn’t have a single driving lesson in 2011, let alone contemplate either of the tests; and I didn’t visit a new country (though I did go to France thrice).
Things people have said: