Raise a glass with me today to the great Peter Hansen, 85, the worthy winner of the inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award presented by The Dull Man’s Podcast for that most admirable and underrated of qualities, dullness.
I confess I had never heard of him until the other day, but then I suppose this was only to be expected of the winner of such an award.
It turns out that he is the inventor of the unpleasant, sulphurous smell they add to otherwise odourless natural gas so as to alert us to leaks – a dullish invention, I grant you, but one that must surely have saved countless lives.
As it happens, I may well owe my own life to Mr Hansen, although I didn’t know this at the time of an unfortunate incident in our kitchen many years ago.
I had hired a monoglot Slovakian painter and decorator, Marek, who in the course of his work hammered a nail into a gas pipe behind the skirting board. We might have known nothing about it if it hadn’t been for Mr Hansen’s revolting smell, which quicky filled the room.
As I rushed around, frantically throwing open all the windows before searching in the cluttered cupboard under the stairs for the valve to turn off the gas at the main, Marek just stood there, squinting at his Slovak-English phrasebook and repeating over and over again: ‘Vorterpitter, vorterpitter.’
When at last I’d located and closed the valve, I asked him to show me his phrasebook, so that I could work out what on earth he’d been trying to say. He jabbed a paint-stained finger at the words: ‘What a pity!’
Peter Hansen, creator of the smell added to natural gas, which is otherwise odourless, and winner of a Lifetime Achievement Award in dullness
But back to Mr Hansen and that award, which he accepted with great good humour, self-deprecation and courtesy – three laudable attributes that, in my experience, often go hand-in-hand with dullness.
‘I couldn’t be more proud,’ he said.
Comparing the smell of his gas-additive to that of ‘bad eggs’ and ‘flatulence’, he said: ‘I had to look for the nastiest smell I could think of. That was the choice. I can’t describe the smell. It’s just horrible.’
He had made hardly any money out of his invention, he explained, because he was in his 30s at the time and ‘I wasn’t very business wise’.
‘But I had the kudos that I delivered the smell and that was enough for me.’
Before I go an inch further, I must warn any readers who suspect I may have my tongue in my cheek when I write in praise of dullness that they couldn’t be more wrong.
Indeed, I agree heartily with Albert Einstein when he declared: ‘A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness.’
I will merely observe that this world might be a degree or two safer today if only Albert and his fellow physicists had embraced dullness to the full, instead of devoting their lives to developing exciting new theories about nuclear fission.
Dusty Springfield, one of Tom Utley’s ‘dull’ preferences in life
As for myself, I like to think I’ve been the very embodiment of dullness since my early teens.
At school, I was never one of the cool kids who worshipped Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan and the Stones. Though I wouldn’t have dared tell my classmates, I much preferred Cliff Richard, Dusty Springfield and Val Doonican.
While the in-crowd bought their casual clothes in Carnaby Street, mine came from Marks and Sparks. These days, I’ve graduated to John Lewis for most of them.
At my posh school and university, the cool brigade also liked (or at least professed to like) the beat poet Allen Ginsberg, artists such as Mondrian and Kandinsky and the novels of James Joyce and Jean-Paul Sartre.
I infinitely preferred John Betjeman, Gainsborough and Millais, PG Wodehouse and good old Jane Austen, whose books I have read again and again ever since, with never diminishing pleasure.
As for my other tastes, you can keep your fancy cocktails, your haute cuisine and exotic foreign holidays on faraway islands I’ve never heard of.
Give me an honest pint, a steak and chips – and, for choice, a holiday cottage in the British Isles.
This year, we’re off to the good old, dull old Isle of Wight.
In the world of work, meanwhile, I flatter myself that I’ve devoted almost 50 years to expressing heroically dull opinions in print – dull and desperately old-fashioned, anyway, in the view of many of my sons’ generation.
You should see how my boys roll their eyes, for example, when I write that it’s simply absurd for any individual to insist on being referred to by the plural pronouns ‘they’ and ‘them’.
They yawn when I express my fear that today’s teachers and university lecturers brainwash their students with a crassly distorted, Left-wing view of our islands’ history, which paints almost everything about our past as pure evil.
Does it never occur to them that Britain has damn sight more to be proud of than almost any other country on the planet? Why else do they think the UK is the number one destination of choice for so many migrants fleeing the world’s hell-holes (far too many for our own welfare and social cohesion, in my dull, old-fashioned view)?
As for celebrating dullness for its own sake, I’ve written columns in praise of Britain’s suburbs as the ideal places to live. I’ve described, ad nauseam, my love of crossword puzzles and afternoon telly, and my dislike of fashionable phrases such as ‘reaching out’, ‘can I get?’ and ‘going forward’ when it’s used to mean ‘in future’.
I’ve confessed in print how I’ve begun to irritate even the patient Mrs U, by scowling ‘don’t mention it’ every single time another driver fails to thank me for pulling over to let him pass on a narrow road.
Once, I even wrote a piece extolling Tim Henman! Enough said.
True, dullness on its own isn’t always a desirable quality. For instance, you have only to think of John Major, Theresa May and our present walking disaster, Keir Starmer, to realise that a Prime Minister needs something rather more. A functioning brain, for starters, and perhaps the guts to stand up for common sense against those who would bankrupt us all.
But I must stop now, before I bore you all to tears. I have an appointment with my regular crew of old codgers at the pub, where we’ll swap ancient jokes we’ve all heard a million times before, and tell each other how much better life was in the old days, before the entire world went mad.
Never let it be said that we don’t dare to be dull!
Oh, but before I go, I suddenly remember that in the course of almost 50 years of rambling in print, I’ve told that story about Marek the decorator on more than one occasion.
Is it too much to hope that this will boost my chances of a future award for dullness?
