The Phnom Penh PostFriday, 17 July 2009
Charlie Brooker
I'M a jammy little bastard, because as time's gone by I've somehow managed to convert each of my interests into a job.
There's been a chain of good fortune. As a child I idly doodled cartoons; as a teenager I drew comic strips for a kids' comic. Since cartooning was now my job, I needed a new hobby. Luckily I had one: video games. In my 20s I began reviewing games for a living. That put food on the table, but in my spare time, for a laugh, I built a Web site taking the piss out of TV shows. This led to a column in the Guardian and so on and so forth and blah de blah. Lucky, lucky, lucky all the way.
The only trouble is that when your hobby becomes your job, it immediately ceases, by default, to be your hobby any more. And now I've run out of hobbies.
I'm not into theatre or chess or steam trains or any of that. Films are too similar to TV shows to really offer relaxation, and there's no way I'm taking up a sport. Spare time is dead time.
What I really need is to develop a deep interest in a subject deep enough to absorb decades of my life. Take history. You can read thousands of books about it, or go to museums, or form little local societies where you all go on organised excursions or whatever.
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Every now and then I’ll try to force myself to suddenly find history fascinating.
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I wish I was into history, but I'm not. Besides robbing me of hours of potential hobby time, this lack of historical interest leaves me feeling guilty and uninformed. Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it, after all. What if I accidentally kick-start the First World War all over again through sheer ignorance? That wouldn't look good on anyone's CV.
And interest can't be faked. Every now and then I'll try to force myself to suddenly find history fascinating. I'll buy a popular history paperback peppered with glowing review quotes, open it up and stare earnestly at the words within.
It's like dangling a toy in front of an uninterested cat. My eyes may be locked on the page, but my brain simply glanced with mock curiosity for the first 10 minutes before wandering off somewhere else. And there's nothing I can do to tempt it back.
Recently, on holiday, I visited some ancient ruins, to shuffle around alongside some other random tourists. Everyone was being quiet and reverential because that's what's expected of you by the International Thought Police. It's quite stressful and eerie.
Say you find yourself staring at an old pot. Your brain, being an incredibly sophisticated computer, immediately assesses that it's an old pot, and that old pots are boring. It's not going to to dance, or sing heartbreaking songs of yesteryear. It won't even rock gently in the breeze. It's just going to sit there being a pot. Probably a broken one at that.
If it was on television, they'd at least have the decency to back it with some upbeat techno while zooming in and out, and even then you'd immediately switch over.
But instead, because you've got the misfortune of actually being there in front of it, surrounded by other people, you have to stand and look at the poxy thing for a minimum of 30 seconds before moving on to gawp at the next bit of old shit, or everyone's going to think you're a philistine.
The same principle applies in art galleries and museums. They're full of secretly bored people pulling falsely contemplative faces. It's a weird mass public mime.
Obviously I'm not saying all history and culture is rubbish, or indeed that everyone's as shallow as me. But I strongly suspect that unless you're a hobbyist or expert - and most of the visitors won't be - then the average museum or gallery probably contains four or five fascinating items sprinkled among a whole lot of filler.
In other words, you'll spend 10 minutes being interested for every 50 minutes of boredom. Yet if you dare shrug or yawn, everyone'll call you a bastard. To your face. Or at least that's how it feels.
All of which makes it difficult to envisage developing a deep interest in history or art, at least from a standing start. So they're out as hobbies.
Perhaps "starting a collection" would do the trick - although I've never quite understood how collectors pass the time.
Technology has presumably muted the thrill of the chase somewhat; thanks to eBay, I could probably assemble a championship-level thimble collection in less than a fortnight if I put my mind to it.
What do you do with a collection, apart from look at it? You can clean it, I suppose. You can build a display cabinet. You can bore other people by pointing at bits of it and saying, "Guess how much that one's worth, go on".
But apart from that, what's the point? Essentially you're just accumulating atoms. Well whoopie doo. How pointless.
Tell you what else I don't get: breathing. Every day, all day. Breathing. No let up. It's relentless. And that's just a load of atoms too. They go in, they come out, they go back in.
Boring. When you break it down, it's as futile as collecting stamps or staring at bits of old pot. In which case, I might as well start nurturing it as a hobby.
At least it's one I'll definitely stick to till the day I die.
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