BOREDOM R.I.P.

The age of boredom is dead. Boredom’s not actually that old an idea, the word having been coined in 1852 in Dickens’s Bleak House.

This was when Britain was the world’s largest economy, when the pre Raphaelites were doing their thing and Tennyson was poet Laureate. Yet in my own childhood just over a century later, we were still told we must be capable of dealing with boredom. Like grief, boredom was something that happened to everyone and you just had to sit quietly and wait.

There wasn’t much else to do of course. Shops were shut on Sunday. Actually there weren’t many shops and hardly any restaurants. Loneliness was commonplace (unless you smoked of course. Remember the advertising campaign “You’re never alone with a Strand”?) When the circus came to town it was a very big event rather like the Olympics but with animals. In the early ‘60s the world was a quiet place. When we went to Greece it was like being an intrepid explorer.  Local Greeks would walk up and stare at you in astonishment whilst you needed a police permit to travel to northern Corfu.

There was the polite absence of things going on. Cabinet Ministers were addressed as “Sir” by BBC interviewers and were given an easy time and we were still hanging people - not so polite that. There was always football of course and draught bitter and Mackeson Stout. But just this week I noticed that the number of people going to the theatre now exceeds the number of people who go to watch football.

I have this funny feeling that the heyday of football is over and will decline - a dull, overpriced game that is no longer beautiful - and the era of DIY eventing in on us. The number of people practising “circus arts” has shot up and the incidence of activity holidays - learning to cook, dance, yodel or write creatively has shot up. (Sorry I lied about “yodelling” - that was an example of creative writing.)

The modern world is about “doing things on the move”. Visiting, trying and watching. Bite sized everything.
Today it’s Sunday I can read several 100 page Sunday Papers, I can go shopping to hundreds of boutiques and specialist shops, eat from a choice of every cuisine in the world, listen to street musicians who in the 1960s would have been at the Palladium, go to see one of 30 different films, drink wine, fruit cider, cocktails, infinite varieties of tea and coffee - even Vietnamese coffee. You haven’t heard of it …me neither till today.

I am, literally, spoilt for choice.

Check out what’s on for families and there are museums, activity centres, discovery centres, open farms where you can cuddle animals of your choice. The menu of possibilities is too long for anyone to conceive of getting bored.

My grandsons and great nieces have far busier diaries than mine…poor things.

Boredom is dead. Exhaustion is the new boredom.