All bores are boring but not all boring people are bores. There are plenty of innocent folk who like nothing more than to share their anxieties about the village fête with you – and they’ll do it for 20 minutes you’ll never get back.
Yet these are just ‘sweetie bores’, as Jennifer Paterson, one of the Fat Ladies and ’s erstwhile food writer, dubbed them. Their reliance on platitudinous observations has been immortalised in Robert Thompson’s cartoon, set in a typical suburban sitting room. The mandatory grotesque wife with her packed suitcase is screeching at her diminutive husband, who is pulling back the curtain to look up at the sky.
