Wake up! It's the tie-arranging lecture

Not much on next weekend? How about a conference on roof-watching, milk-tasting, sneeze cataloguing and other ‘boring’ topics?

‘OH, NO. THIS is in danger of becoming interesting,” says James Ward, the organiser of Boring 2010, when he hears that tickets to his conference have sold out. Ward booked room for 250 people to attend the inaugural event at the Dominion Theatre Studio in London next Saturday thinking that nobody would be interested. The response has meant having to turn many people away.

Thinking about it sends him into a semi-serious reverie about the possibilities for Boring 2011. “Maybe we could have it in the O2, and we could spread it over a couple of days,” he says.

Those in the know about all that is mundane, prosaic and banal put the instant sell-out down to the late addition of the legendary Peter Fletcher. For three years he has been logging his every single sneeze: the time, the date and what he was doing when it happened. Pie charts and graphs break down the sneezes by strength, ratio and force (mild, moderate, strong or very strong). Fletcher will be joining other acclaimed bores at next weekend’s event, which will involve a series of talks interspersed with question-and-answer sessions.

Lewis Dryburgh is travelling down from Aberdeen, in Scotland, to talk about "the intangible beauty of car-park roofs". One of the other talks is called The Ease of Extracting Electricity from Municipal Buildings in the Metropolis and Beyond: A Comparison. (It's about sockets.) There is also a milk-tasting demonstration that will feature a self-declared expert in all matters lactic comparing whole, semi-skimmed and UHT milk. It is "a first in beverage research," says Ward.

Ward will talk about cataloguing ties, with reference to colour, material, thickness, pattern, style and other qualities. “I’ll be bringing my spreadsheets,” he says.

Ward, who is 29 and works for a DVD distributor, came up with the idea for Boring 2010 after he heard this year’s Interesting Conference had been cancelled. (At that, “interesting” speakers were tasked with presenting for 10 minutes on a topic unrelated to their day jobs such as design or travel.)

“I put out a joke tweet about having a Boring conference instead,” he says. “I got loads of replies from people saying, ‘I’ll help out,’ ‘I’ll go’ and ‘I’ll talk at it,’ and then things started getting out of control. I had thought the idea would just go away but then it got to a dangerous level where people were genuinely interested. So I was trapped into doing it. Then it just started getting bigger and bigger. We had to move it to a bigger venue and there are now going to be 25 speakers.”

He was careful not to give the speakers any guidelines or structure so they can roam freely in their specialist area. “What I’ve found is that ‘boring’ can be interpreted in many different ways. So if I had prescribed how people should frame their talk it would have ruined it.”

Ward, who tweets at @iamjamesward, has impeccable credentials for the topic. His popular blog is headed “I Like Boring Things”, and he is a founder member of the Stationery Club (stationeryclub.wordpress.com), which is for fans of paper clips, Post-it notes and marker pens. He is also the author of the London Twirls Project (londontwirls.blogspot.com), in which he notes the price, availability and storage conditions of Cadbury Twirls, mainly in central London. It is curiously fascinating. Categories include Interesting Price Labelling Systems, Kentish Town Road Twirl Price Fixing Scandal, Might Have Some on Tuesday and Being Stared at by the Owner.

Neither a humourless geek nor a post-ironic prankster, Ward is aware of his oddness. “There is a level of self-awareness there. Yes, these are strange obsessions to have. For all of us involved, we know we’re in a trap of our making with these compulsions. But the joke, if there is one, is on us,” he says.

“The great paradox here is that on the surface all these topics seem very boring, but when you look at anything in enough detail and focus a lot of attention on a subject it takes on a different dimension. The idea is not to make boring ‘cool’. I like to see this as Slow Entertainment; the equivalent of the Slow Food movement. How I put it on my blog is that this is a celebration of stillness and sameness.”

Some of the talks have a point. Tedious Espionageis about how the James Bond world of flashy Aston Martins and sexy women is at a complete remove from the nuts and bolts of daily espionage. "Jet packs and cars that can drive underwater have nothing to do with the mundanity of pencil and pens in an office studying paperwork," Ward says. Then there is also someone speaking on all the videos he has recorded but has never watched.

But isn’t this all just trainspotting for the Twitter generation? “I was in the London Transport Museum recently, and they had a notebook from a 1950s trainspotter. I was looking through it and suddenly realised that it was identical in many respects to how I wrote my London Twirls Project. The impulse was the same,” he says. “Trainspotters have a bad reputation, but there’s wholesomeness to it. Taking on something such as recording all the rolling railway stock of the place you live in should really be celebrated.”

Already looking forward to a bigger and better Boring conference next year, Ward is excited about encountering his fellow enthusiasts. “I haven’t actually met all of the speakers,” he says. “But those I have met seem like nice and well-adjusted people. You wouldn’t suspect there was anything wrong with them at all.”

boring2010.wordpress.com