I have never understood being bored. Long periods without excitement, yes, but never so outright bored that I could not find some way of finding something, even mundane things, interesting in some way. This is indeed one of the greatest survival skills that I learned growing up an artistic nerd in a small town in the middle of no where BEFORE the internet.  So when I heard that there is actually a boring conference, I was naturally intrigued.

The Boring Conference is the brainchild of James Ward.  It has been held in November in London  for the past two years.

• “’It’s about looking at everyday things with which we are so familiar in a new way. The theme may be boring, but the content isn’t,” said organiser James Ward, 30, who dreamt up the idea of a Boring conference last year when the “Interesting” conference was scrapped for lack of interest. Boring, on the other hand, sells. It began as a joke on Twitter but the tickets for yesterday’s event sold out within days and the biggest risk the event faces is becoming too interesting . . . It all looked promising. However, there was one item on the agenda that was causing concern: the locations for the Hugh Grant film About a Boy. This appeared to be straying into film buff territory, which could be construed as interesting. Ward looked uneasy. ‘Well, it’s borderline. It qualifies because of the amount of times the film is shown on ITV2. Switch on any Sunday afternoon and there’s a 50-50 chance of About a Boy being on, so it qualifies as being very familiar and something we take little notice of.’ Ward, who works in DVD distribution (“not very interesting titles”), built up his Boring movement via Twitter and, sad to say, has a reputation for being a funny and entertaining tweeter.”

In fact the Boring Conference has embraced the idea that it completely fails to bore the attendees even though it does indeed try its hardest.

Here are some of the topics:  a photographic survey of toast, hand dryer technology, parking garages, a web site tracking celebrities’ heights, the use of Google maps to chart IBM cash machines around London, electricity pylons, yellow lines, shop fronts, and self-service checkouts.

I think this goes to the very principal of life itself: if you are interested, truly interested in something, anything, even the most common thing that you can imagine, you will be interesting as a human being, and that’s awesome. If you insist on being jaded and uninterested in things, you will be a total bore. Perhaps the Boring Conference would succeed by having someone sit on a chair and complain that there is nothing to do in this amazing  21st-century world, but even that could be  turned into a brilliant comedy routine if done right.

Click here for more information about the Boring Conference.