I was interested to read recently that Her Majesty The Queen’s party planner, Lady Elizabeth Anson, makes a point of putting boring guests together as ‘They don’t realise they’re the bores, and they’re happy.’ Knowing what passes for sparkling wit among the English aristocracy, this did make me chuckle – the social Siberians are probably the interesting ones, and the rest of the guests are too busy boring on about hunting and shooting to get it.
For what is a bore? – nothing more than someone we personally find uninteresting. But what if we’re boring, and we just don’t get them? It brought to mind the old torch song –
‘Everybody’s somebody’s fool
Everybody’s somebody’s plaything
And there are no exceptions to the rule
Yes, everybody’s somebody’s fool’
Similarly, I feel that everybody is somebody’s bore.
When as a child I complained that I was bored, my mum was wont to scold that ‘Only boring people are bored!’ Surveying the provincial drear of my 1970s one-calf country, I would reflect mulishly that this was very probably a big fat lie on my mother’s part. Oscar Wilde himself would surrender his sarcasm in sheer molten despair after a season in my ‘burg, beaten down by being dragged round BHS by mater every Saturday come rain or shine and being stared down by that little bitch on the test card to infinity and beyond.
The spectre of half-day closing – wherein shops closed down just after lunch on any given weekday – rigorously rubbed in one’s suspicion that however big and shiny one’s dreams, a half-life was more likely to be the best thing on offer. As my contemporary Morrissey put it, every day was like Sunday.
But then in one bound we were free, and every day was Friday night; even Sunday was no longer the Sabbath but yet another wonderland of wining, dining and buying-onlining. Not only has half-day closing gone the way of all flesh but now even local shops open as a matter of course from dawn till drop; BHS, the El Dorado of drear, is dead, killed by retail options cheaper and more cheerful. I always found it freaky to think that my grandmother was alive in Edwardian times, but the world before the internet and Islamofascism – rocked in the bosom of Cold War security – seems equally foreign now.
But though the breeding ground for boredom has been razed to the ground, bores – like cockroaches – are eternal have-a-go mutants. Here are a few Brave New Bores who have, in my opinion, replaced the traditional trainspotter type – who, ever the contrarian, I actually find quite sexy.
The Bore Viveur
This old, male bore really does have some genuinely interesting stories, which often take place in the dear dead Colony Room and involve Francis Bacon and/or Princess Margaret. But he has repeated them so often that he’s made them boring. He could spice them up a little every few years by adding a few piquant twists – after all, his subjects are invariably dead, so no sucker’s going to sue. But, being a bore, this courtesy won’t cross his self-satisfied mind.
The Sleeping Beauty Bore
Usually female, in early middle-age, but can be a gay man. Their character stopped developing when their beauty became evident and people started trying to please them. Now they habitually wear a baffled look, wondering why no one wants to listen to their dreams anymore. Will often develop alleged food intolerances in order to claw back a bit of attention, eventually stomping off to fester in the countryside and drink own urine.
The More-More-More Bore
Like the SBB but with less beauty and more beast, these people are fidgets who have turned their ants-in-the-pantsiness into some sort of raison d’etre. On holiday they can never sit quietly with a book or surrender themselves to sunbathing – they always have to be up yomping about and dragging everyone else with them. In later life they often form a strong bond with a canine companion to whom compulsive capering around is a plus rather than a pain.
Want to be sure you’re not a bore? Talk about sex, politics and religion, books and music. Take a drink, but not too many – I can be wonderfully witty on a little gin, and mind-bogglingly boring on a lot. And be aware that the worst bores are those who can’t accept that they are ever boring; my best friend often bores me something rotten in her car (but only then, oddly) rambling on about her really rather pedestrian life, but the minute she starts, I turn up the radio really loudly, she laughs and stops being boring and we invariably have a lovely time.
Sometimes the only way to stop a bore is to feed them, mock them or shock them. But – like madness – it is only when we cease to realise and admit to our own capacity for the commonplace that we truly have lost the plot. For the rest of us who are not yet stark, staring boring, the plight of the poor souls at the isolation table may still be avoided.
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