The Boring Conference – the fascinating world of the mundane and ordinary

In previous years, topics have included sneezing, toast, IBM tills, the sounds made by vending machines, the Shipping Forecast, barcodes, yellow lines, the BBC programme Antiques Road Trip, and assorted arcane features of the Yamaha PSR-175 Portatune keyboard.

This year, 20 speakers will tackle, in 10-minute slots, subjects as diverse yet snoozeworthy as domestic inkjet printers of 1999, episodes of the game show You Bet, German film titles, ice-cream-van chimes, how to cook elaborate meals with the equipment found in hotel bedrooms, similarities between 198 of the world's national anthems and – thrillingly – the widely disliked font Comic Sans.

Yes, it's time once more for the annual Boring Conference.

Billed as "a one-day celebration of the mundane, the ordinary, the obvious and the overlooked", the conference, now in its fourth year, aims to address subjects that – in the words of founder James Ward – may "often be considered trivial and pointless, but when you look at them more closely, they reveal themselves to be actually deeply fascinating".

Ward, who works in the marketing department of a high-street retailer and has just completed a book – to be published later this year – called Adventures in Stationery, says he launched the event after the 2010 Interesting Conference was cancelled. "I was already running a blog called I Like Boring Things, and it just felt like an obvious thing to do," he says.

So what makes the ideal boring speech? "The basic idea is that the theme needs to be boring, but the content shouldn't be," says Ward. "There has to be something in the topic that a speaker with a real enthusiasm for it can bring out and make interesting. In fact most things, if you look at them in enough detail, can become fascinating. There's almost always something there."

Previous highlights include a talk about electric hand dryers by "a man so fascinated by them that he had installed a Dyson Airblade in his house", and a speaker who "rollerbladed round the hall while reading from a book about the relative weights and densities of different kinds of metal". Ward is particularly excited this year by the prospect of a boring presentation entitled Eggs, and another about Eric Clapton's bookshelf.

Unfortunately, the event, this Saturday at London's Conway Hall, is clearly interesting to some: it has sold out. You could queue for returns, though, if you can be bothered.