Mitch's Blog

Meet the members of the Dull Men’s Club: ‘Some of them would bore the ears off you’. By Susan Chenery at The Guardian:

The 18th-century English writer Samuel Johnson once wrote, “He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others'. It’s a sentiment eagerly embraced by The Dull Men’s Club. Several million members in a number of connected Facebook groups strive to cause dullness in others on a daily basis. In this club, they wear their dullness with pride. The duller the better. This is where the nerds of the world unite.

“Posts that contain bitmoji-avatar-things are far too exciting, and will probably get deleted,” warn the rules of the Dull Men’s Club (Australian branch).

Maintaining standards of dullness is paramount. Alan Goodwin in the UK recently worried that seeing a lesser spotted woodpecker in his garden might be “a bit too exciting” for the group.

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Australian member Andrew McKean, 85, had dullness thrust upon him. He is, dare I say it, an interesting anomaly in the Dull Men’s Club, a shift in tone. Three years ago, he had a heart attack. He recovered but the hospital’s social workers deemed him unable to care for his wife, Patricia, and they moved to a nursing home in New South Wales. There is nothing droll or amusing about being stuck in a nursing home. But he has elevated the dull institutional days into something poetic and poignant by writing about them and posting “to you strangers” in The Dull Men’s Club.

His life before moving into a home had been anything but dull. An electronics engineer, in 1967 he was connected to the Apollo moon mission. Then a career in the television broadcasting industry took him to the UK, Malta, West Africa and Canada.

Once a traveller who lived in a sprawling house at Pittwater who spent his days in the sea, now his life is reduced to a single room – “Every trace of my existence is contained within these walls.” Sitting in his worn, frayed armchair by the window “watching the light shift across the garden, he writes about ageing and “the slow unfolding of a life”.

He is surrounded by the “faint hum of machines and the shuffle of slippers … the squeak of a wheelchair, the smell of disinfectant”.

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He lives for the bus and a few hours of freedom in a life that has shrunk. On the bus “something stirs in us, a flicker of youth perhaps”. He treats himself to KFC, “the sharp tang of it a small rebellion against the home’s bland meals”.

He sits on a park bench, an old man with a stick, invisible and inconspicuous to the people rushing past “watching the world’s parade, its wealth and hurry”. He observes it all and reports back to the Dull Men’s Club. “Though the world may not stop for me, I will not stop for it. I am here, still breathing, still remembering. And that in itself, is something.”