We took our son to our book club yesterday evening. We all met at a bar restaurant place under the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank, and we spent a glorious three hours talking about Rodinsky’s Room and uproariously deciding what book to read next.

And all the time, little eight month old Jack was there, playing with bits of paper, being bounced about, smiling at people and (eventually) sleeping in his pushchair – but, naturally, marginalised from the main activity.

And I got to thinking about how bored I used to get as a child, how I remember the hours of being dragged to places by my parents, made to wait as they had mystifyingly entertaining conversations with friends, or watched stuff on telly or went round National Trust properties. In fact, my abiding memory of being a kid with my parents is of boredom.

And I realised that I can’t really remember the last time I was truly bored. Whenever people tell me that they’re bored, I often find myself telling them that I love being bored. I’m wrong, of course. I mean that I love being aimless – fiddling about with whatever’s at hand. I don’t really know what it is to be bored any more. There’s so much to do – play a videogame, watch one of our backed up Lovefilm DVDs, read a one of my many backed up books, flick through one of my many backed up Edges, read my backed up Bloglines feeds, write a review for Pixelsurgeon, write a post – like now – for Rotational…

And these are just the things I like doing. Then there’s cleaning the flat, sorting through all that paperwork that I keep putting into great, horrifying untidy piles, wash some clothes, get some bloody milk we can’t keep spooning baby milkpowder into coffee.

And before all that there’s looking after the boy.

Even on long journeys I don’t get bored – there’s DS and reading and watching Sin City on PSP and listening to music…

So bored just doesn’t come into it anymore.

I guess that’s good, but I’m not sure. Could I cope without being endlessly stimulated by something or other? And what if the electricity runs out?