THE MASTER LIST

I am a denialist. This means that if I don't think about things that upset me, they don't exist. This is how I avoid being heavily medicated and/or paying obscenely large therapy bills.

Aside from being a denialist, I am also a lover of lists. I do love, lurve, loooove lists, right up there with fine chocolate, beautiful linens and the smell of lavender and...well...I like lists, not because I am particularly organised but because I like the symmetry and beauty of everything being so prettily summarised on a page and of course, one needs innumerable and delightful books in which to write lists, so it's really like the whole , "coming full circle" thing.

So, when I saw that Mighty Girl had completed a list of the 100 things to do before, errrm, leaving the earthly world, it combined something I want to deny - mortality, with something that I love - lists. Who was I to refuse to participate in something that would simultaneously terrify and delight me.

My list is at once realistic and fantastical; I make no apologies. Here are the first ten:

1. Shoot skeet - preferably in Barbour jacket, dark green wellies and a tweed cap;

2. Complete a keepsake family tree complete with calligraphy and bound in leather. Pass it on to my daughter and hope that successive generations of women continue to add to it;

3. Drink a Bellini at Harry's Bar in Venice;

4. Kiss a Pope's ring;

5. Play baccarat at the Monte Carlo Casino dressed in a floor length lipstick red couture gown;

6. Walk on the Moors;

7. Watch my daughter be the third generation to marry at the church where I was married and where my mother was married;

8. Live in an ashram in India for a month and take a vow of silence for the full month;

9. Master the fabulous Bollywood dance by Madhuri Dixit in the film Aaja Nachle; and

10. Have a "last" completed by John Lobb shoemakers in London - get a pair of knee high, bespoke leather boots made.