That’s all I said on Facebook on Sunday night, and I got some surprising responses. My sister liked the status — I presume she was being empathic and understanding how I felt, but it did come across a little like she was pleased I was bored. Then someone I used to work with said “aye”, as if they already knew I was bored, and then finally someone I was at university with said that I should write a blog post on boredom.

The tricky bit is trying to make a post about boredom interesting. Because that’s the one thing that being bored isn’t. There are no books I’m particularly feeling inspired to pick up at the minute (it’s not that I’ve not got unread books — there are about a dozen on my TBR pile, only I don’t really feeling like reading at the minute. I don’t particularly feel like playing a computer game; there’s fuck-all on telly (to give you some idea how desperate it is, I’ve got the X-factor on at the moment).

So, having filled the dishwasher, emptied out the washing machine, and checked my emails half a dozen times, I’ve decided to go to bed. The theory being that if I’m asleep, I’ll not notice I’m bored. There is of course one rather significant drawback with this plan. I’m a nightowl, and it is extremely rare that I’ll be asleep before midnight (frequently two or three a.m.), so going to bed before half-past eight is likely to find me horizontal, awake, and still bored.

Of course, what I’m doing at precisely this minute is typing up a blog post, which I suppose is hardly conducive to going to sleep (and if I do drop off, I’ll end up with qwertyitis anyway). But I’m not really that physically tired: it’s more that my brain just wants to switch off and find something to be entertainingly diverted by for a couple of hours.

For me, blogging normally fits that requirement. It’s not something that seems like work; there’s no real effort involved; the words just arrange themselves up into sentences in my head and then through the magic of typing and just a little bit of computery goodness, they find themselves floating about on the screen in front of me.

Unfortunately, as I end up thinking about whatever I’m blogging about, in this case it is just serving to remind me that I am bored. I did get diverted into a brief discussion of the fantasy board game Talisman (fantasy in this case being swords and sorcery, rather than nudey ladies — although if anyone does have a board game that comes with free nudey ladies, I might be interested in that also…) which occupied a certain amount of my time (and caused many late nights) during my late teens through to university life.

I even got sufficiently distracted to download the PC version of the board game and give it a go, although this suffers from one major flaw. It really is a multiple-player game, and it takes a certain amount of the fun out of it, playing two of your own characters against one another. Ideally you want three to five people, a big table with the board laid out on it, some beer, and about ten hours you don’t ever want to see again. Then you can play Talisman.

Although the unofficial PC version was kinda fun from a reminiscency point of view, it wasn’t as much fun as actually playing the board game with real people would have been. Now a proper, turn-based version of that board game available online to play with others around the world; that would be something worth playing.

A board game for the bored, indeed. So thank you to Mr. Wood from distracting me from my boredom and getting me to try and remember the rules of Talisman (considering the last time I played was about 13 years ago, it’s surprising how much I remembered!).

If I was to say “give me an evil prophetess with the runesword every time…”, I bet there would be a few people out there who would know what I was talking about