The Case for Boring Hobbies
A boring hobby — the bird table watched from a kitchen window, the weather notebook, the jigsaw done in company, the same walk taken four hundred times — is a pastime whose whole point is that it cannot be performed. It belongs to a family of things with better public relations: slow hobbies, analogue pastimes, the gentle industry of making and mending. But it is not quite any of those, because a boring hobby is never undertaken to fix yourself. You do not watch the greenfinches to be well. You watch them because they turn up at half past seven and it would be a shame to miss it.
This is a blog about the unspoken rules, rituals and objects of a disappearing analogue world, mostly in Sheffield and the rest of the North, and I have come to believe that boring hobbies are where that world survives best — not in museums but in sheds, on allotments, in church towers and around the tables of pubs that still run a Sunday dominoes. They matter more than usual just now, because leisure is being quietly reorganised around being seen. Every run is plotted and posted, every loaf is photographed, every hobby is asked, sooner or later, whether it would like to become a small business. The boring hobby is the last unharvested acre of the day, and I want to defend it with the seriousness we extend to green belt. I have kept a weather notebook for eleven years; the most exciting entry in it reads ‘moderate drizzle, dipper’. I am, in other words, a believer with credentials.
What counts as a boring hobby?
A boring hobby is a pastime that produces nothing, improves no one, and cannot be posted. It passes three tests:
- There is no audience, or the audience is three other people doing the same thing.
- There is no metric. You cannot be better than somebody else at noticing.
- The product is the time. Nothing comes out the other end but an afternoon.
The roll call is long and quietly glorious: bellringing, crown green bowls, dry-stone walling, moth trapping, stamp collecting, trainspotting, needlepoint, proggy mats, pigeon racing, letterboxing across Dartmoor, trig-pillar bagging, audax cycling (two hundred kilometres at a civilised pace, stopping to collect a receipt), cryptic crosswords, the pub quiz league, tide tables, canal-boat painting. Even the insult is heritage. ‘Anorak’ entered the language as a joke at the expense of trainspotters in their parkas on the cold ends of platforms, and the hobby has worn the word like a rosette ever since.
The rules nobody writes down
Boring hobbies are dense with law. This is what the sneerers miss: the hobby looks like solitude, and in practice it is a small society with a constitution nobody has ever written down. Consider:
At the bowling green, the tea round rotates with the seasons and is administered without discussion. You do not volunteer to make it. You are told it is your turn, you accept, and this is how the club has held together since before the war.
At the jigsaw table, the edges are done first. You do not force a piece. You may not finish another person’s section without invitation, and if the last piece of the sky finds its way into your hand, you are obliged to offer it to whoever built the sky. I know this because an aunt corrected me about the sky in 1997 and I have never fully recovered.
On the allotment, the show is the year’s climax, and the rule is that you congratulate the man who beats you with onions he has plainly been cossetting since March. You suspect the comfrey. Everyone suspects the comfrey. Nobody says it out loud.
On the path up the Porter Valley, the greeting is ‘now then’, and the reply is ‘now then’, and that is the whole liturgy. More is for people who have met; less is for people from away.
In the bell tower, you learn the bells’ names before you are allowed near the ropes, and the treble is not to be handled lightly by anyone.
None of this is bureaucracy. The rules are the glue; the hobby is the excuse. When people say a community has been ‘lost’, what has usually been lost is a room full of people who agreed, without writing anything down, whose turn it was to make the tea. The boring hobby is that room, still meeting.
A short field guide
Three examples, drawn from within a bus ride of this desk, to show what the pastime looks like at ground level.
Watching the bird table
I keep a notebook of what comes to the table outside my kitchen window in Walkley, and I can tell you that the coal tits arrive before the blue tits, that a particular robin holds the yard against all comers from October to March, and that the greenfinches, which once arrived as a noisy committee of a dozen, now come in ones and twos, if at all. That last observation is not a mood. A parasite called trichomonosis took hold in British greenfinches in the mid-2000s and their numbers fell hard, and my dull little notebook has become, without my asking, a document of it. This is the quiet power of a boring hobby: it turns an ordinary person into a witness.
Once a year, the witness is asked to testify. The RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch, running since 1979, asks hundreds of thousands of us to spend one hour in January counting the birds in our gardens and to file the results, producing one of the largest garden wildlife surveys anywhere, staffed entirely by people in cardigans looking out of windows. The bird table is trainspotting for people who like being warm.
Walking the same route on purpose
There is a theory, common in fitness culture, that a walk only counts if it varies. The boring hobbyist walks the same route on purpose. Mine runs up the Porter Valley from Endcliffe Park, past Shepherd Wheel — a water-powered grinding workshop that still sits in the woods with its wheel, where men sharpened edge tools for a couple of hundred years — and out towards the moor edge. I have walked it in every month of the year and in several grades of rain, and it has never once been the same walk. The wood anemones arrive in a particular week. The dipper, when it deigns to turn up, is always under the same bridge. Knowing a path this well is a form of ownership no deed could improve.
Walking is also the founding boring hobby of the North, and it has a radical history that the cardigan conceals. In 1932, young workers led a mass trespass onto Kinder Scout, demanding access to moorland kept for grouse; some of them went to jail for it. The argument they started ended, nineteen years later, with the Peak District National Park — Britain’s first, and still the only one that reaches inside an English city’s boundary, because Sheffield’s western edge is in it. The Ramblers, founded in 1935, grew out of that fight and still organise the Sunday ramble, the most boring and most durable of institutions. You can be standing on gritstone within the hour of leaving the town hall, on a bus that stops at every village that asks.
Collecting things nobody else wants
Collecting is the most misunderstood of the boring hobbies, because it has a shadow: completionism, which can shade into avarice, and the sneerers are right that some collections are really balance sheets. But the true boring collection is small, local and loving. Stamps, hinged into an album that smells of somebody’s loft, priced against the tiny print of a Stanley Gibbons catalogue. Matchbox labels — phillumeny, a word the hobby is quietly proud of. Milk-bottle tops. The Ian Allan spotters’ books in which a boyhood version of your grandfather logged Deltics at York in 1962 with a pencil he had been given for Christmas.
The objects change status as the world moves. When Royal Mail stuck barcodes on the ordinary definitives, the stamps my mother kept in a drawer became a small archive overnight. The boring collector is not holding out for value. They are keeping the receipt for a world. My own collection is a shoebox of bus timetables, and I want it on the record that I did not choose this. It chose me.
Why the boring hobby matters now
Because unharvested time has become rare, and the boring hobby is the cheapest way to keep an acre of it. Every hobby now has a content wing. The loaf is photographed before it is eaten; the run is plotted and published; the jumper is not finished until it has been modelled. There is nothing wicked in any of this — the craft-fair stall pays somebody’s rent, and I refuse to sneer at a rent — but the effect is that the afternoon is increasingly spent in anticipation of its upload. The boring hobby has no uploadable form. The notebook stays in the drawer. In a culture that harvests attention from every field of the day, a pastime that cannot be harvested is not merely old-fashioned. It is a holdout.
Psychology offers the boring hobby a modest character reference. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent a lifetime arguing that the good life is found in absorption — ‘flow’, he called it, the state of being so taken up with a task that the self gets a rest. There is also a small but consistent body of work, including studies by Sandi Mann at the University of Central Lancashire, suggesting that boredom is not the enemy of thought but its compost: people made to copy out telephone numbers came out the other end measurably more inventive with a polystyrene cup. I would not build a cathedral on one experiment. But it matches what the notebooks say. The bird table is where the mind goes to graze.
The honest account includes losses. The model shop has mostly gone the way of the record counter. Philately is, by its own societies’ admission, an ageing pursuit. Bellringing — medieval technology, mild exercise, tea afterwards, a perfect boring hobby — has spent years openly worrying about recruits. But the boring hobby does not so much die as move house. Moth traps hum in gardens that never had one. Dry-stone walling courses fill in autumn. The weather diary has migrated to the Met Office’s Weather Observers Website, where thousands of amateurs file daily readings from rain gauges nailed to fence posts. The form survives; only the address changes.
And in the North the boring hobby has always carried more than its own weight, because when industry withdrew, it was the clubs, the institutes and the chapel rooms — the infrastructure of unglamorous time — that kept towns stitched. The pigeon lofts of Barnsley. The band room on a Tuesday night, where the same eleven people rehearse the same march for a contest in Blackpool. The bowls green the council keeps threatening and never quite dares. When people say ‘community’, they usually mean a set of people who have agreed, without writing it down, whose turn it is to make the tea.
How to start one this weekend
Choose low, buy nothing, keep the notebook in the drawer. That is the whole method, but here it is in steps:
- Pick something with a low ceiling and no audience. If a pastime can be measured, posted or monetised, it will eventually ask you for those things. The bird table, the weather diary, the jigsaw, the cryptic crossword in the local paper and one walk taken repeatedly are all available at ground level.
- Spend nothing for the first month. You do not need binoculars to watch a bird table, any more than you need a carbon frame to walk the Porter Valley. A notebook and a pencil will do, and the pencil should be old.
- Find the club if you want one. Tower captains have been short of recruits for years and will teach you the bells’ names before letting you near the ropes. The allotment association will issue you a plot and a set of opinions. Sheffield’s Sorby Natural History Society, meeting since 1918, will put you among people who know which bridge the dipper likes.
- Keep a notebook, even if the hobby seems to consist of nothing worth recording. Especially then. The notebook is the hobby’s soul, and in eleven years it becomes a document.
- Do it badly, on purpose. Competence is not the point. The point is the half hour, and the pencil, and whatever turns up.
Frequently asked questions about boring hobbies
What is a boring hobby, exactly?
A pastime that produces nothing, improves nothing measurable, and cannot be performed for an audience. Classic examples include watching a bird table, keeping a weather diary, doing jigsaws, stamp and matchbox collecting, trainspotting, crown green bowls, bellringing, dry-stone walling, moth trapping and walking the same route repeatedly. The test is simple: if doing it in private would feel like exactly the same activity as doing it in public, it qualifies.
Are boring hobbies good for your mental health?
Modestly and indirectly, which is how most good things work. They offer absorption without evaluation — a state psychologists call flow — plus a reason to be in the same room as other people at regular intervals. Small studies also suggest boredom incubates daydreaming and creative thought. They are not a treatment for anything, and anyone who tells you a jigsaw will fix your life is selling jigsaws. As a way to spend an ordinary Tuesday, though, the evidence and the anecdote agree: it helps.
What are the cheapest boring hobbies to start?
Walking one familiar route in all weathers (free); a weather notebook (pencil, paper, window); the kitchen-window bird count, which costs one hour in January if you join the RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch; the cryptic crossword in a newspaper; and a second-hand jigsaw from a charity shop, taken on the understanding that a piece may be missing, which purists consider part of the price.
Do boring hobbies have to stay offline?
No. The internet makes a fine filing cabinet and a poor stage. The RSPB’s count, the Met Office’s Weather Observers Website and the forums where moth trappers compare their catches are the web at its best: a shed door left open. The rule of thumb is that the web may store the hobby but must not perform it.
Isn’t it insulting to call a hobby boring?
From inside the hobby, no: ‘boring’ is the membership card and ‘anorak’ is a rosette. From outside, the sneer has usually been about class — the joke at the trainspotter’s expense was very often a joke at working-class seriousness, at men in parkas logging locomotives with the diligence their fathers put into the works. The word is safe here because it is used with affection, which is the only way to use it.
What comes next
I want to make this a recurring column — a Catalogue of Boring Hobbies, one per essay: its objects, its slang, its unspoken rules, its tea arrangements. The allotment show is coming, and so is the band room on a Tuesday. If you keep a boring hobby, especially one conducted in a shed, and especially if it has a rule nobody has ever written down, write and tell me what it is. I have a shoebox of bus timetables and I am not afraid to use it.
The greenfinches are down, but not out. Somewhere in Walkley a robin is holding a yard against all comers, and it will be there at half past seven, whatever the rest of the world is asking of your afternoon. Bring a pencil.