In praise of boredom

THE last time I was truly, painfully, bored, in the way that I remember from childhood — watching the minutes tick by as if they were hours; desperately craving stimuli other than the contemptible ones on offer; feeling an increasing urge to somehow vent the frustration physically, vocally, or preferably both — was almost exactly a year ago.

It was during a seemingly never-ending church service held to celebrate the feast of the Assumption in a sleepy village in northern France. The service being led by a man distinctly lacking in charm, not to mention priestliness, and my understanding of ecclesiastical French leaving something to be desired, every long minute beyond the first 30 or so became more and more torturously, tantrum-worthily boring.

This was the kind of stretching-out of time that modern life only rarely affords. But it was only once the ordeal was over — and memories of the Catholic masses I’d been dragged to as a teenager had subsided — that its unusualness struck me, and I noticed that my feelings of pleasure were now intensified. How the river glistened in the morning sunshine! How wonderful to be alive and free and on holiday!