The chap from the Süddeutsche Zeitung was awfully polite as he quizzed Hamish Thompson, one of the organisers of the annual Boring conference, which took place in London on Sunday. "Have you, erm, worn that jumper especially for the occasion?" he asked.
Thompson looked down at his unexciting navy jersey. "No, no," he said. "I was up at 6am cutting cucumbers and this was what I threw on in the dark."
He gestured to the Boring buffet – bowls of undressed iceberg lettuce, cucumber chunks on sticks, piles of white sliced bread, dry crackers and label-free bottles filled with tap water.
It was undoubtedly a Very Boring spread. Yet the conference was sufficiently interesting to attract not just the classier end of the German press but also 500 free-willed people who paid up to £20 each to spend a Sunday listening to a series of lectures on superficially tedious things: the relative heights of celebrities; letterboxes; and the features of a keyboard. Kathy Clugston, a Radio 4 announcer, discussed the shipping forecast.
Waiting for more than half an hour in the November cold to get in, one conferencegoer wondered aloud whether the surprise queue was what it seemed. "Maybe it just goes on and on and at 5pm they'll let us out the other side?" he mused. "That would be really boring."
No one present actually expected to be bored to tears. Peter Steeples, 54, a civil servant in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, believed the conference was about making dull things shine. "If I really wanted to be boring, I'd do a presentation about my day job," he said, adding that he could talk about his hoard of promotional pens and pencils.
To some, the idea of Boring 2012 is irritating in the extreme – maddeningly ironic, annoyingly contrarian, the sort of thing enjoyed by people who ride bikes with no brakes around east London while wearing 1980s-style Global Hypercolour T-shirts and listening to a Walkman.
Yet there was joy among the arched brows. James Ward, the 31-year-old marketing manager who came up with the first Boring three years ago after noting the cancellation of an Interesting conference, entertained with a talk entitled Unexpected Item in the Bagging Area, a history of self-checkout machines. In the 20-minute talk, Ward told how he defrauded a Waitrose store by miscategorising Portobello mushrooms as their cheaper "cup" cousins. ("A security guard was standing right next to me as I carried out my mushroom hustle – I've never felt so alive.")
Some lectures were surprisingly touching. Leila Johnston's confession that she photographs IBM cash registers and plots them on a Google map at first seemed unbelievable and stagey. Then she revealed the obsession stemmed from her childhood in Greenock, western Scotland, home to an IBM factory. The town's children were given IBM spare parts to play with, and the firm has retained a special place in her heart.
Johnston's talk cheered Karen Christopher, a teacher from the US. She and her husband, CJ Mitchell, attended the first Boring, held in 2010 in a room above the London theatre where the Queen musical had been on. "The motto that year was We Will Not Rock You," she recalled. Boring was not just an irony-fest, she said, but a way of seeing beauty in the mundane. "It's a communion, a coming-together, a place to discuss daily things which are normally glossed over."