» Dani’s diary
Dani discovers that boredom and being stuck in the pouring rain can be a dangerous combination
I never fully understood how anyone could really be bored to tears. But this week I can begrudgingly say that I found out. And after four and a bit hours on my own, suffering from the most acute stage of boredom there is, I can hands-down say that I felt like I would burst into tears.
I generally need to be occupied, or at least have something to do. But when faced with absolutely nothing for a few hours, things went somewhat downhill.
“Either way, I was insane and so was everyone else”
I had been stuck in the pouring rain earlier in the day, and while the boredom set in the itchy legs did too. But as the boredom escalated I had managed to persuade myself that something which everyone with damp trousers experiences was actually some weird leg disease. So while suffering with leg disease (don’t ask me the ins and outs of the affliction, as I didn’t get further than it being something that makes you scratch until there is nothing left!) I was also worrying that I would lose the ability to talk, so would then try and speak out loud to myself to check that my four hours of solitude hadn’t totally pushed my vocal chords into death. But the speaking out loud would make me wonder – isn’t talking out loud to yourself something that insane people do? Is being this bored actually making me (more) insane? Or are the people who we class as insane due to their vocal outbursts actually just really lonely and worrying that the lack of conversation is turning them dumb? But then to go for that long without speaking to anyone might be a warning that there is some problem anyway. So either way, I was insane and so was everyone else.
Then I became briefly distracted by the skin on my hands, and the fact that due to my compulsion to wash my hands more than is probably necessary, I have some really dry red skin happening across my knuckles. And I was starting to imagine myself in a year’s time, having the face and body of a 21-year-old but the hands of a 180-year-old washer woman. This caused my boredom to verge on terror and then the tears wanted to try and push their way out. But I stopped them. I just got angry instead. Which didn’t really help as the anger just made my legs itch even more which subsequently drove me to believe that my legs would need to be amputated. Along with my bum cheeks, as they are always the bits that itch the most when you are stuck sitting in the same position in damp trousers, especially when you’re wearing woolly tights underneath, which seemed like a good idea in the morning when it meant you would be extra warm. That was a bad idea wasn’t it!
So I tried to distract myself from my boredom by reading. My book is about a private investigator lady in the 1920s, and that just made me feel worse because that’s exactly what I want to be.
You can see my point now. It is not a good idea for me to be left alone with nothing to do for a matter of hours. I just turn into a nutter who talks to themselves about their mysterious leg disease.
