GOOD TIMES, GOOD TIMES

Time to look on the bright side of boredom (Caitlin Moran, The Times, April 17th, 2006)

All goes well in the halls of academia. Presumably reflecting a world where our major problems have been solved and nothing bad has happened for at least 50 years, a psychology lecturer at Edge Hill College, Lancashire, is embarking on a study of boredom. Dr Richard Ralley hopes to present his eventual findings over the summer — traditionally a time when teachers experience great boredom themselves, what with there being no marking, or small boys to remove from big bins.

Dr Ralley, it seems, believes that boredom has been underestimated. While humanity has acknowledged its enjoyment of other negative emotions — blind murderous fury, say, or the kind of moping self-pity that involves wearing unwashed bed-socks for a week — it seems that boredom, like communism or Supertramp, is one of the few things not to have enjoyed a modish rediscovery trumpeted by Dazed and Confused.

“Boredom is something — it’s not just switching off,” Dr Ralley is quoted as saying, presumably in a perversely excited tone of voice. “Boredom has a bad name . . . but it can be a good thing. It can be useful.” He is particularly concerned that the large, grey estuary-like stretches of boredom that characterised the childhoods of previous generations might be lost to the modern child. He counselled parents contemplating the Easter holidays to cancel the activity school, swimming lessons and piano instruction, and “Leave children to their own devices. Let them recover from their last term at school.”

Of course, however laudable Dr Ralley’s aims, the layman can observe a few flaws in his project. First, one wonders how he will actually find any bored subjects to study. As he suggests, the combination of PlayStation, Sky+, contraceptives and skunkweed have surely eliminated the pockets of ennui that previous generations will have so readily not-enjoyed. Sunday trading alone has irrevocably altered the current generation. I can recall being so bored on Sundays — empty streets, tolling bells, a million identical roasts slowly drying in their ovens —that I had competitions with my seven siblings over who could hold their breath the longest. Often we passed out and fell to the floor whilst the others looked on, purple-faced and impassive. On other occasions we tried to eat small snacks with pugilistic slowness. My sister Caz once spent over two hours sucking on sultanas, until they eventually rehydrated back into brown grapes in her mouth. Eddie, meanwhile, managed to reduce a small cube of cheese into curds and whey, which he then triumphantly spat back into a spoon and drank.

As every good conservative knows, the absence of boredom is only one-half of the tragedy of modern youth. The other is too little pain.