Above Bored

Above Bored
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday March 28, 2015

The ticketing machine coughed and spat a small paper chit into my hand. A64 it read. I surveyed the crowded foyer. A dozen bodies already occupied the grid of public seating.

I sighed, knowing the next half hour of my life would be confined here, waiting to renew my car registration. A woman’s sultry voice spoke through the intercom: “Ticket A51 to Counter three” I silently cursed her for making the Department of Transport sound seductive.

I sat down next to a well-upholstered woman playing Solitaire on her mobile, wishing I hadn’t left my smartphone in the glove box. Closing my eyes, I tuned into the drowsy hum of office machinery. A ceiling fan pattered lazily overhead. Even now and then, the rustling of documents was punctuated by the ka-chunk of a stapler. Sexy intercom-woman called her next customer: “Ticket A52 to Counter one.” I hadn’t been this bored in ages.

As a kid, boredom was my only-child milieu. With a single mum forced to work full-time, my routine was routine. After school, I amused myself by riding my bike on a continuous circuit of the block, accompanied by the tic-a-tic-a-tic of the bright plastic beads that slid up and down my spokes. The faster I pedalled, the noisier my wheels became. Dogs barked as I flew down the hill. I prayed Mrs Gillett’s terrier wouldn’t attack me just because biting was fun.

My job before bed was to climb behind our Thorn television and keep wiggling the rabbit ears until my Nan announced the picture had stopped rolling. She could then watch the rest of Bellbird uninterrupted.

Crouched amongst the cables, each hand gripping an antenna, I couldn’t see the screen. My view was of a blank wall, a standard lamp, and Nan in her Merry Widow armchair, a dinner tray on her lap.

I marked time by studying the two halves of Nan’s face: one side in shadow, the other aglow. When my eyes grew weary of inspections, I opened my ears and silently mimicked the tick-tock of the mantel clock shaped like Napoleon’s hat. Boredom was mine for the next ten minutes.

Saturday mornings stretched languorously before me as I sunned myself on the concrete steps outside Nan’s washhouse, stroking our cat Percy into slumber. That’s when I tugged my doll’s bonnet over his ears. As he jolted awake I fastened the strings under his chin. Then I bundled him into a cardboard box, shut the flaps and whisked Percy away to my room. The carton became a makeshift theatre, Percy exited stage left, a runaway thespian. I was a box office flop.

Boredom reached new lows in Year 10 chemistry. Our teacher, Mr Holden, was florid and nervy and wore squishy shoes. Our windowless chemistry lab had four rows of concrete workbenches. The humid air and the hiss of the Bunsen burners made me sleepy. Reciting the periodic table dulled my brain. I got my halogens and my noble gases confused. I would have dozed off were it not for Mr Holden’s nipples.

They were like nipples I’d never seen. Actually, they were the only men’s nipples I’d ever seen. Large and fleshy, they sat like two discs of polony under his shirt. I couldn’t decide if they were particularly pink or peculiarly protuberant. Or perhaps they showed through his pale shirts because the fabric was transparent from frequent laundering. Either way, my classmates Anita and Sue were equally mesmerized. Flustered by our giggles, Mr Holden’s face would creep crimson and he’d begin to stammer. His nipples became the two least boring elements in chemistry.

Lately I worry I’m not getting enough boredom. Watching taped episodes of Downton Abbey, I fast-forward the commercials. At the checkout I reply to emails on my phone or fire off a handful of texts. I can squeeze efficiency into every spare minute. With a stimulating gadget at arm’s length, I’ve almost eliminated boredom from my life.

And yet I’m beginning to miss the soothing emptiness of wasted time. Perhaps that’s it! Boredom represents the luxury of having nothing pressing to do; when time slumps to its slowest ebb.

On stage at a recent writer’s event, I noticed three silvery-haired women in the audience, front row. They were sitting together, smiling and nodding at me, handbags on laps. Halfway through my lovingly-crafted speech, I glanced at them again. The middle one had dozed off, chin to chest. Her companions’ heads were drooping and jerking, eyelids fluttering a useless fight against sleep. I gulped. Had my talk caressed them into a nap? I delivered a witty punchline and watched the trio startle as people began to clap.

“Most entertaining!” said the middle lady to me as we mingled afterwards.

“So glad you enjoyed it,” I said. “I was worried I might’ve been boring. Would you like a cup of tea?”

Enough about me

Enough about me
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday May 11, 2013

A conversation is not just a rudimentary exchange of information or a conduit for drinking with friends. It has winners and losers. It can be life changing. I know this because a conversation in a pub landed me my husband.

Back then, I didn’t know fate had arranged for me to be leaning against the back bar of the Subi hotel with a man wearing Ronnie Barker glasses. He was comfortably stout, like a prized footballer gone to pot, and I noticed his manly hands (I have a thing about extremities). He was charming, disarming and attentive but it was the way he spoke to me that made me skittish, like Bambi. Here was a man who was warming up for a conversational joust. I set out to beguile him with my verbal prowess.

I failed to allow for the first glass of champagne on my empty stomach. It sent my mouth galloping ahead of my brain. Halfway through the second glass, I was babbling and gushing. Sentences I should have filtered for tedium and stupidity dropped straight onto my tongue and became clumsy word spillage. I was all single-entendre, my brilliant wit sabotaged by a bad case of love jitters.

On this night, I thought it best to attempt being a coquette, rather than try to outfox this razor-sharp raconteur when I’d gone all goosy. And anyway, he was asking too many Mensa questions: “So, being an only child, what have you learnt about other people?”

How to respond? I squirmed. He leaned back and propped his elbows on the bar while a lively silence throbbed between us. My brain darted about in search of a penetrating reply but all I could come up with was: “the big question for me is why none of my yoga pants have ever been to yoga?”

He grinned – I took it as a compliment. And then he leaned in close, brushed an eye-lash off my cheek and whispered “Make a wish.” I giggled in falsetto.

I secretly asked the champagne fairy for three wishes – I wished this man would take me home and hang his bad tie in my closet, I wished to grow old and grey with him and I wished for thinner arms. The good fairy granted two wishes, and I’m resigned to wearing sleeves.

That is the G-rated version of the night I met my man on a late summer’s night. Our eighth anniversary has just passed (un-remarked), but he remains a challenging conversationalist.

Conversation is an art form. We all admire those who have mastered the serve and volley of lingual ping-pong.   

But some acquaintances suck the oxygen out of the air by talking incessantly. Self-obsession asphyxiates friendships. If I’m button-holed by a bloke who doesn’t draw breath for two minutes, I hightail it to the dessert buffet.

Interrupters also infuriate: my children have perfected the technique. But it’s adult interjectors who should be gagged – those people who leap in and ruin my punchlines, or smother me with their preoccupations. I murmur to myself: “Sorry I was talking while you were interrupting.”

Why can’t bores recognise themselves? Some even refer to themselves in the third person, just so we can appreciate them from yet another angle: “And then the nice girl in Country Road said to me – Barbara Blackwood – you look amazing in that colour. Barbara, that dress goes so well with your tattoo. Barbara, we should name that dress after you – we’ll call it…. The Barbara!”

I, too, used to think my stories were riveting. At 20, I landed my first job in commercial radio: a chick among peacocks. I answered the phones with try-hard sophistication: “96FM , we will rock you!” Teetering in my white stilettos I would carry cups of International Roast to celebrity disc jockeys with velvet tonsils. On Friday nights I would regale my friends: “And then he asked me to be the barrel-girl! Me! He told me to giggle and rustle the entry forms so they made crunchy paper noises, it was sooo cool…”

Before long I caught two girlfriends rolling their eyes at each other across the table. My ego collapsed. These days I tell my stories while keeping my third eye roving for audience boredom.  

Some people like to take over a conversation – they interject about their famous second cousin the soapie extra, or launch into the intricacies of their colonoscopy (scraping the bowels of social convention). Some people feel compelled to convince me that daddy long legs are poisonous but their mouths aren’t big enough to bite people, and if I disagree, they become strident.

At my home in Utopia, my conversational skills are sagging. My 12-year-old cancels me out with his noise-cancelling headphones. Husband is riveted by The Footy Show and can’t be distracted so my three-year-old and I compete for each other’s attention.

Sometimes, when I want to ask my beloved about the state of our relationship, I’ll sidle up to him and say: “Honey, do you remember that night we met in that pub?” And he’ll smile and say: “Yes, blossom, that’s the night you thought talking about yourself constituted a conversation.”