The internet abounds with rundowns of the most popular bucket list requests: the things we would like to do before kicking the bucket, when that looks like an imminent prospect. They tend towards the obvious (leave those dolphins alone), but not if you are Annie, a 99-year-old Dutch woman with an eye for mischief.
According to a Facebook post, Annie, whose surname was not revealed, asked police to arrest her and throw her in a cell. Photos posted by police in Nijmegen, a city close to the Dutch-German border, show Annie beaming as officers handcuff her while she sits behind toughened glass. Karlijn Baalman, chief of police for Nijmegen Zuid, tells me that an officer picked Annie up in his police car as a surprise after her niece had shared her wish. “Annie explained that she had always been a very good girl and wanted to experience this,” Baalman says. Her slender wrists later slipped through the cuffs. “We all had a big laugh at that,” the officer adds.
But wait - breaking news - Annie is not even the oldest lady to make a similar request. Just last year, Edie Simms, a 102-year-old woman from Missouri, was handcuffed and thrown (or rather lowered gently) into the back of a police cruiser before being taken to an event at her retirement home, fulfilling her own bucket list dream. US cops appear to be popular choices for bucket listers. Last month, a teenage girl from Ohio with terminal leukemia got her wish to shoot someone with a Taser. Alyssa Elkins fired the electrified barbs into the back of Sgt Doug Bline of the Newark police department. “I don’t like inflicting pain on people, I didn’t know it was going to be that painful,” she said as the officer collapsed in a contorted heap. She then shot her uncle before calling it a day.
Ten years after the not-very-good film Bucket List inspired a cultural phenomenon, bucket lists have taken hold to such an extent that people now impose them on their pets. When Angus, a Bernese mountain dog, received a cancer diagnosis from his vet in 2015, owners Dawn and Allan Birse made him a list of last activities. It included a “play in the snow”, achieved at an indoor ski centre near the dog’s home outside Glasgow, a swim in Loch Lomond, a pint of beer and a light fish supper.
But pensioners have the best ideas. Walter Thomas, a 91-year-old from a suburb of Chicago, wanted to know what it would be like to smash a car through his garage door. So he did. “I hit the gas, squealed the tires and bang! We went through the door,” he told reporters. “I don’t know what I could do to top it. I’m getting too old to top anything; I just live life to the extreme.”
