Poetics of toilet paper rolls take centre stage at sold-out Boring Conference

It's a dull story, but six years ago, when the Interesting Conference was cancelled, a new conference was born — the Boring Conference.

This year — to make an excruciatingly-tedious story short — the Boring Conference has moved to a bigger location in London. And, even so, it's sold out.

Past topics have included barcodes, toast and the sounds made by vending machines. But the subject chosen by one of this year's speakers perhaps surpasses even those in terms of blandness.

"This is a deeply boring subject — I assure you," Nicholas Tufnell tells As It Happens host Carol Off. "Walking around writing down serial numbers from toilet roll tubes is probably about as dull as you can get."

Tufnell started writing down the codes at an early age. Eventually he amassed a sizeable collection, undeterred by the fact that the codes really have no special meaning.

"I got older and the impossibility of life began to weigh on my soul and jobs and things got in the way. I sort of forgot about these codes," Tufnell admits.

But then Tufnell started a difficult job — a job so bad that he hid in the workplace bathroom to escape.

"I noticed the serial numbers again and it made me laugh and it reminded me of when I was young," Tufnell explains. "I thought, well, I may be running away, but, while I'm here, let's try and make something out of these moments."

During that epiphany, Tufnell came up with a way to transcribe the serial codes into words.

"I decided to impose some meaning onto them," Tufnell says. "For every number, I'm going to associate it with the corresponding letter in the alphabet, so that is to say 1 is A, 2 is B, and so on and so forth."

Initially the translations were gibberish, but Tufnell explains that after some arranging he was able to write a collection of 32 toilet roll poems — one for each of London's boroughs.

Take a listen to Tufnell reading one of his toilet paper tube poems called "Fogged Beef": 

As It Happens1:12"Fogged Beef," a poem by Nicholas Tufnell

"Fogged Beef," a poem by Nicholas Tufnell

"The sort of lonely or lost poems of London's lavatories," Tufnell says.





Other topics to grace the Boring Conference stage include German pedestrian crossing signals, paper bags and lamp posts. Tufnell understands some may think his poetry is too interesting to compete, but insists that his process is truly one of the duller points on the "gradation of boring."

"I defy you to go out there and collect the serial codes of toilet tubes all over Canada — it gets dull very quickly."