I do love a survey, even though I think most of them are highly suspect. I find myself reading the results of the latest survey with great interest only to realise that, rather than a scientific inquiry involving a large, varied sample of people, it was just a journalist canvassing a few of their friends to find out what they thought. Or I come upon a survey proving that statins are the key to eternal life and then discover that it’s financed by a large pharmaceutical company. Bearing all this in mind, I was still interested to learn that a quarter of UK adults have never boiled an egg.
Naturally, the survey was conducted by Waitrose, a UK supermarket. I can see why they’d be interested in their customers’ cooking skills, or lack of, but it also makes me wonder whether boiling an egg is really a crucial life skill. Would my life have been significantly poorer if I’d never made an egg sandwich? Perhaps very slightly. But it certainly wouldn’t head my list of things an adult really should know how to do. So, what is on that list?
I did a quick search and, unsurprisingly, the internet is full of people who are anxious to tell us what skills adults need to get through life. Being able to change a tyre is supposedly very important, although now that most cars don’t have an extra wheel, I don’t see the point. Apparently, we also need to have basic first aid skills, know how to unblock a sink, be able to put up a shelf and manage our finances. All very useful, but I think we need to add interpersonal skills to that list, such as developing empathy for others, bringing up children, practising tolerance and managing conflict. That’s fine for other people, but this is what I want to do when I grow up:
- Learn the NATO phonetic alphabet – why do I always think that F is for Freddy?
- Make perfect hummus (apparently the British eat more hummus than anyone else in Europe)
- Recite a poem from memory
- Convince myself that I love gardening (lots of people do, why not me?)
- Organise the photos off my phone and onto something else
- Memorise the capital cities of all the African countries
- Take my recorder playing to a higher level (our semi-detached neighbours have had it far too easy up till now)
I think all this would take two adult lifetimes, so maybe I’ll just concentrate on the first one. Tango, Tango, Foxtrot, November.