I’m not entirely sure how, but it seems that Boring 2010 actually seemed to work. There were goodie bags for everyone, the speakers all turned up, the technology seemed to work, the presentations were great, people seemed to enjoy it. It worked. I think I’ll do it again next year.

I thought the labels looked nice. I’d had the idea of having a rubber stamp made and stamping something, but I didn’t really know what. Then I was in a stationery shop and I saw these bundles of brown paper labels, and I thought they were perfect. Stamping them on both sides took a couple of hours, and tying them to the handle of each bag too a bit longer, but I thought they looked lovely. I’m pleased with them.

Look at how pretty loads of yellow pencils look when they’re in a big pile:

I can’t remember how I thought of the jigsaw puzzle thing. I think I’d been thinking of things with hundreds of pieces. I’d originally thought of buying loads of used postcards from eBay and giving four or five to each person. Although to do this, I’d need to buy at least eight hundred used postcards. I bought eight hundred used postcards, but then I decided to keep them for myself because I liked them too much. Some of them are lovely:

10th August 1953: Dear Mrs Wheeler, I am having a lovely holiday. Love Charles.

I also felt there was something tragic about these postcard collections on eBay. The postcards were quite cheap, two hundred for six quid or so. Obviously, at some point, someone had collected these cards, they’d kept them safe. They’d spent time slowly building up this collection and then, for whatever reason – lack of space, death – someone had decided to get rid of them, and the only person interested in buying them is a prick like me. I couldn’t separate these collections, it would be too sad. The cards had already been rejected twice, first by the original recipient and second by, let’s assume, the collecter’s grieving relatives. They couldn’t be split up. You wouldn’t have appreciated them anyway, you bastards. You’re only interested in chocolate bars anyway.

Once I’d had the jigsaw puzzle idea, I realised that although it was quite a simple idea, it was actually going to be quite a bit of work. A one thousand piece jigsaw puzzle. Take out two hundred pieces. Bag the rest of them up. But which two hundred pieces? The edge pieces, obviously. But there aren’t two hundred edge pieces. There was something like one hundred and thirty six edge pieces. So now you have to find another sixty four pieces to take out? Which sixty four pieces though? Start making the jigsaw and get a couple of patches done, so people have a head start. But that means doing the jigsaw, or at least quite a bit of it. And then how do you transport it without mixing the pieces up? Do I really have to stick four fucking pieces of a jigsaw puzzle into a tiny little plastic bag and then do it again and again and again until there are two hundred of the fucking things? Yes, apparently so.

It was a good effort from the crowd though:

There are a couple of people I need to thank, as it wasn’t all down to me. Isabelle helped printing everything out as I’d taken the second half of last week off work and don’t have a printer at home. Actually, this was quite amazing, much like Luminess Air. I’d sent Isabelle the running order, and she added URLs for each speaker’s website/Twitter etc. Except in googling Ed Ross, she’d added the details of the wrong Ed Ross and so, all of a sudden, this other Ed Ross started getting Tweets saying how much people liked watching him taste different types of milk. Fantastically, he decided to film himself doing his own milk taste test and uploaded the video to Youtube:

I also need to thank Natassia who not only sourced all of the records which went into the goodie bags, and carried them on the tube, but also put up with me talking about nothing apart from Boring for months. Sorry about that.

I’ve posted links to the websites and Twitter accounts of all of the speakers on the Boring 2010 blog, and I recommend you take a moment to look at them all/add them on Twitter etc as they are all fantastic people and without them, Boring would just have been me, standing on a stage, shouting at people to finish a jigsaw puzzle.

Thank you everyone.