Bores

Patrick Kurp, at the consistently worthwhile and ever estimable Anecdotal Evidence ,

the other day expatiated on the subject of bores, beginning,

One of the unexpected rewards of retirement has been a serious reduction in the number of bores in my life.  

And that sounded right to me. One can be more selective of one's company in retirement whereas you could get stuck with all kinds at school, university or in work.

But those of us who find it necessary to use the internet as an outlet for what a teacher at our school called 'verbal diarrohea' ought to be wary of calling others bores when we ply our trade in 'performing repeats of all the stories' our readers have 'heard in slightly different versions'. It is to be hoped that those who come here willingly do so for similar reasons to those I go to Anecdotal Evidence for and they don't include 'wanting to read a bore'.

Patrick ends with a reference to Bertrand Russell as an example. Perhaps these days one could suffer few more boring than Rod Liddle. Times Radio is good and has its least listenable presenters, him and Geoff Norcott, on at times when I'm not usually tuned in.

But, reflecting on the issue, I'm somehow haunted by various traumas from school, university and work as if this unforseen paradise with almost exclusively company I choose to keep was somehow lacking the antagonism life once had as a matter of routine.

And then I wonder if the people involved were 'bores' or uncongenial in other ways. I recently wrote myself a little memoir of 1981 - not for wider distribution, necessarily- which was a seminal year, moving from the lax, liberal campus life at a low-grade university to that of full-time work in a job unsuited to my limited personality and range of talents. More or less from a culture dominated by middle-class Marxists who enjoyed post-Trad jazz to one where money was a god and, as it turns out, Clarkson's Top Gear, the golf club and Dubai are objects of desire. 

I owe a fair amount to the three years I had at university and the four and a half I subsequently spent employed as a salesman. I don't know how I'd have got from the age of 18 to 25 without them. But whether the people there were 'bores' or only incompatible, it's hard to say. On balance, the Civil Service jobs were better because, despite the plentiful supply of odd characters, there were hundreds of people to find suitable friends among and the day I gained entry into that cosseted employment was the luckiest of my whole life. And, moving beyond that strange but relatively safe world, I've retained the best of them, soon lost the others and by now my inbox receives mainly messages from suitable poetry, music and amenable sorts of people.

I had realized that much but I hadn't got as far as Patrick Kurp in understanding, or putting it, quite so well. Which is why I read him.

--

But here's a test of boringness, or esoteric obsession. 

I've had to clear out much of the upstairs room that serves as archive, library and now the summer escape room if kids are playing their football outside in summer.

It is astonishing what one finds in the unclassified clutter. Like tickets to football matches from 1971. Vivid memories attach to Coventry-Forest on my 11th birthday, not many to West Brom-Man City and none at all to Swansea-Brighton. But looking up that game at Abertawe, I find that someone else has posted their ticket to it on the internet. They weren't sitting near me and my dad.

Whether posting such arcane material makes one a bore, though, I doubt. Mentioning something once, however mundane it might be, is okay. It's the very mundanity that can make it of interest. Surely the bore is the one who goes on about the same things all the time to make them eventually dreary.

The work of Karl Marx is of interest and one ought to hear the music of John Coltrane. The acquisition, maybe even modest accumulation, of some money, preferably by leagal means, is a necessary thing. But one is best trying to avoid becoming a parody of oneself. 

But, of course, it was all part of the plot,

and there I was again......

trapped in a story I had read before.