Back in 2011, journalist Peter Robinson noted the arrival of music’s New Boring era, blaming Adele’s Someone Like You and Ed Sheeran’s entire output for this “vortex of boredom – a boretex, if you will”.
In the subsequent four years, the New Boring has lost the epithet but continued to spread its tentacles of tedium throughout modern British life, as young people cease binge-drinking, refrain from drugs and start playing cards. And not even poker, with its grizzled, smokey outlaw image, but bridge, which even nonagenarians may consider a little old-fashioned.
The English Bridge Union has reported a tripling of its young members over the past three years. Granted, this tripling has taken it from 106 to 344 members, suggesting that UK nightlife may be safe from any impending invasion of card-toting youths for now. Nevertheless, it is not a stretch of the imagination to envisage bridge clubs popping up in certain parts of certain cities, with ironic visors and bowls of twiglets, washed down with a gin and bitter lemon.
There has been a ceaseless embrace of twee traditionalism as a lifestyle choice over the last decade. It’s there in the boom in crafts such as knitting and crochet, in twentysomething men with handlebar moustaches, in home-brewed beers and homegrown vegetables, in that viral picture of that man in Starbucks on his typewriter, looking like a plum. Noah Baumbach sent it up in his most recent film While We’re Young, with the young couple, played by Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried, preferring VHS to DVD, and cassettes and vinyl to downloads; they refuse to Google a fact with an iPhone, wistfully opting to just not know the answer instead.
When this pseudo-authenticity is adopted as an identity, it is ripe for the mocking, and Baumbach does this with precision. It’s easy to sneer at life turned into a Keep Calm and Carry On poster, draped in bunting, and served with a Victoria sponge.
Yet as much as it pains me to mount a defence, this surrender to the Boring is largely understandable, and perhaps even inevitable. There is a comfort in the homely, no matter how contrived this iteration of it might be. When everyone is broke and the future seems increasingly bleak for anyone under 30, we grasp for safety and familiarity, for a past that seems less nebulous. Besides, how does a generation rebel against parents who wear Converse and smoke weed and listen to Arcade Fire? By turning into Saffy from Absolutely Fabulous and rolling its eyes at hedonism.
This is, I think, not the same as using a gramophone to play Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds records while supping on a craft ale. Adopting a Boring Lifestyle is about slowing down the pace of a seemingly incessant cultural onslaught and attempting to catch one’s breath. If you are in your 20s or early 30s, perhaps you have noticed your friends declaring themselves to be “runners”, or joining sports clubs, or declining an afternoon at the pub because they are in training for their second triathlon. Maybe they are doing pottery classes or joining a community choir. Maybe they are positioning themselves at the vanguard of the card-game revival and setting up Peckham’s first bridge league.
Recently I have become Boring. The last-but-one holiday I went on was a group trip to Ibiza; it was mostly miserable, and I felt old and curmudgeonly, and the only thing I thought I hadn’t seen before was a naked woman on a trapeze firing lasers over a club crowd, out of a buttplug. It was time to rethink.
So this time, I stayed in a friend’s cottage in a village in the Peak District. I cooked and listened to music and read. I went for long rambles in ill-advised, city-only clothing and squinted at my iPhone’s slow-loading map – there is not much 4G in a valley, it turns out – until I figured out that using signposts and talking to retirees in weather-appropriate fleeces was far easier than wafting my phone in the air, grasping for a signal.
I rode the Monsal trail, an old, disused railway path that has been turned into an idyllic route for walkers and cyclists, and beamed hello to every single person I passed. I went to Chatsworth House and tried to remember that bit from Pride and Prejudice, and then sat in the gardens thinking only about how pretty it all looked in the sun. It was by far the most Boring holiday I’ve ever been on.
When I returned from a week in the Balearics, I was a dishevelled wreck. This time, I felt as if I had come up for air. I was Boring and happy. And besides, nothing makes you feel more youthful than being the youngest person in the surrounding area by a good 40 years or so.
