Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Drummers are living life to the full. That’s why I hate them so much

My copy of the Times on Tuesday this week kindly provided me with a list of things to do in order that I might ‘live life to the full’. I am not at all sure that I wish to live life to the full, having met many people for whom this is their guiding philosophy and having wanted very much to punch them.

The rather banal list of impulsive stuff to do — try different kinds of food, ‘snog’ a stranger, buy some nice clothes, shoot a cat with a crossbow, take lots of holidays* — was appended to an interview with one of the country’s most famous scientists, that man from the telly, Baron Winston. The lugubrious-looking Labour peer confessed that he tended to appoint to his laboratory applicants who did not possess first-class degrees; indeed, he avoided these people, preferring those with second-rate qualifications who had ‘lived life to the full’.

I suppose one can have that sort of cavalier disdain for hard work when, like Winston, you have glided comfortably from a top public school to national fame, but that is beside the point. What I was interested in was the injunction, on the list, to ‘treat each day as if it were your last’.

When people urge you to do this, and idiots quite often do urge you to do this, they do not mean to wire yourself up to a drip in a hospice and transfer your savings into your wife’s name, which is what surely awaits us all on our last day. They mean for you, instead, to be self-indulgent on an epic level. If I were treating each day as if it were my last, this column would commit so many hate crimes that the magazine would be closed down and its staff arrested.

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