It started 40 years ago, at school, when I was telling a story and saw a yawn begin stirring on my teacher’s face. I’ve been on red alert for stifled yawns ever since
I have a visceral fear of boredom, not on my own account but on everyone else’s. I never get bored myself. This isn’t because I’m always super busy doing lots of interesting things. I’m not. It’s just that I can always fill the quieter minutes, hours and days, which could be boring, with dark thoughts of fury, anxiety, regret, sadness or outright panic about something or other. There’s so much rich material to draw on. I’m resourceful in these matters. It’s enervating, distressing and even crippling, but it has this much going for it: it’s never boring.
My fear of boredom comes from a horror of being the source of anyone else’s boredom. I believe this started 40 years ago during a conversation with my history teacher, Miss Finney. I was banging on about something rather clever, I thought, when I saw the beginnings of a yawn stirring on her face. These stirrings soon hardened into a firm setting of her jaw. She had plainly resolved, bless her, to do everything in her power not to let this yawn out. I heard tedious words continue to tumble out of my mouth while I watched her face spasm in an ecstasy of desperate, tiny contortions. I wanted to scream: “Just yawn!” but I was too scared of her.
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