The Spanish have two words for boring. One is feminine, aburrida; the other masculine, aburrido. In these gender fluid times, only a mad person would take the chance of saying which one the individual members of the Spanish women’s football team felt in Palmerston North, the jewel of the Manawatū. But whatever kind it was, poor old Palmy apparently bored them out of their flash footy boots.
Based in, or possibly sentenced to, the Palmerston of the North as their training base for the Fifa Women’s World Cup, the team and their families, evidently European sophisticates, could only stick it out for a few weeks before unceremoniously decamping to Wellington. Apparently Palmy’s “lack of things to do” had “taken its toll”, or so claimed ESPN, the TV sports network.
The Spanish, with belated diplomacy, denied they had been aburrida or aburrido. For “logistical reasons”, they just wanted to be closer to Wellington’s stadium for the tournament’s knock-out stage.
Now, far be it for me to throw chorizo into this piping hot paella of controversy, but I, too, have been aburrido in Palmerston North, muy, muy aburrido.
Growing up there in the late 1970s and early 1980s was an education in tedium, a training camp for boredom. There was no internet, of course, and only three TV channels and no social media or malls or any real nightlife. When KFC first arrived in Palmy, it caused queues down the road.
I suppose the more racy lads were taking girls out in mum and dad’s car, smoking weed and getting shickered at parties. But for most of us teenagers, there were just four things to do in Palmy when you weren’t required to be at school or doing chores at home: tenpin bowling, “the pictures”, stock car racing on Saturday nights and promenading at the Lido, the big, public pool complex.
The first one I only ever did when someone had their birthday there; disappointingly, it involved endless gutter balls and donning shoes that had been on a thousand smelly feet before mine. The second treat was one I could only afford now and then. The third was for petrolheads, and I was a young fellow with pretensions.
The last involved wearing nothing but togs in front of girls, and there was no way I was doing that, not with my legs. The temperature had to be well over 25°C before I would contemplate enduring that particular humiliation.
Thinking back, the only truly exciting thing that ever happened to me in Palmerston North was knocking over our letterbox when I was getting a driving lesson, and frankly, that was the sort of excitement I could do without.
But being a bored teenager in Palmerston North taught me something important, something that today’s screen-dependent kids and spoilt young footballers might do well to learn: that boredom is good for you. It forces you inside yourself so that you might wander about in the endless wilderness of your own mind. It encourages you to grow one of the most important things needed for an interesting and fulfilling life: an imagination.
The sign outside the butcher’s shop read, “Our black puddings are 5 inches long even when it’s cold.”
“What a rude sign,” Michele said, somewhat prudishly. “Is it?” the young, female butcher said, somewhat innocently. “I’ll have a black pudding, please,” I said, somewhat embarrassingly.
There was another sign, this one inside. It said, “Sorry NO EGGS. Chickens being freeloading slackers.”
We know what that’s like. After the untimely demise of the demonic Little Linda last summer, when the Four Hens of the Apocalypse became the Three Stooges, our feathered friends have become freeloading slackers, too. What has gone wrong? Have they forgotten how to lay eggs? Or have they become entitled millennials who think the world owes them a living? Perhaps life without the excitement of being chased about and violently pecked by Little Linda has taken its toll.
