A PAIN IN THE NECK

How often have you ducked into a crowd on catching sight of a crashing bore and beat a hasty retreat into the nearest departmental store to make a fictitious purchase? If you didn't duck, you would end up being a sitting duck for his/her long and tortuous barrage of inanities that could bore a hole into your cranium driving you bonkers.

A bore is a person who talks when you wish him to listen. He also belongs to a class of bipeds who spend so much time talking about themselves that you can't talk about yourself. When you try to talk to him, all you do is stare at his mouth with a forlorn hope of finding a silent gap in order to interject your views into the matter under discussion. While an intelligent conversationalist talks because he has something to say, a bore does it because he has to say something.

Bores come in assorted hues and forms. A congenital bore is one who takes to boring people like a fish takes to water. You could almost believe if someone told you that such a Mr Bore, as soon as he was born, talked for hours on end with the midwife who delivered him about how much he got bored during his 9-month-old incarceration within his mother's womb, of how he withstood suffocation in the amniotic fluid, of how he survived the ordeal of claustrophobia in the confines of the uterine walls, of how his movements were impeded by the umbilical cord and finally how relieved he was on entering the free world full of willing listeners. With such a person one can be bored until boredom becomes a mystical experience.

Another master bore belongs to the genus 'Borelia Consummata', a consummate bore. Just as the beauty pageants keep harping on "Beauty with a purpose", this bore artiste's pet slogan "Boredom with a purpose." Boring people is, for him, a means to an end. Who this bloke could be? To find out, read the next post, "A Boring Drill."