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My new hobby? Developing interests. Or trying to. It's not easy though - an old pot is just an old pot

This article is more than 12 years old
Charlie Brooker
Sun 21 Jun 2009 19.01 EDT

I'm a jammy little bastard, because as time's gone by I've somehow managed to convert each of my interests into a job. There's been a chain of good fortune. As a child I idly doodled cartoons; as a teenager I drew comic strips for a kids' comic. Since cartooning was now my job, I needed a new hobby. Luckily I had one: videogames. In my 20s I began reviewing games for a living. That put food on the table, but in my spare time, for a laugh, I built a website taking the piss out of TV shows. This led to a column in the Guardian Guide and so on and so forth and blah de blah. Lucky, lucky, lucky all the way.

The only trouble is that when your hobby becomes your job, it immediately ceases, by default, to be your hobby any more. And now I've run out of hobbies. I'm not into theatre or chess or steam trains or any of that. Films are too similar to TV shows to really offer relaxation, and there's no way I'm taking up a sport. Spare time is dead time. What I really need is to develop a deep interest in a subject deep enough to absorb decades of my life. Take history. You can read thousands of books about it, or go to museums, or form little local societies where you all go on organised excursions to Sutton Hoo or whatever. I wish I was into history, but I'm not. Besides robbing me of hours of potential hobby time, this lack of historical interest leaves me feeling guilty and uninformed. Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it, after all. What if I accidentally kickstart the first world war all over again through sheer ignorance? That wouldn't look good on anyone's CV.

And interest can't be faked. Every now and then I'll try to force myself to suddenly find history fascinating. I'll buy a popular history paperback peppered with glowing review quotes, open it up and stare earnestly at the words within. It's like dangling a toy in front of an uninterested cat. My eyes may be locked on the page, but my brain simply glanced with mock curiosity for the first 10 minutes before wandering off somewhere else. And there's nothing I can do to tempt it back.



All of which makes it difficult to envisage developing a deep interest in history or art, at least from a standing start. So they're out as hobbies.

Perhaps "starting a collection" would do the trick - although I've never quite understood how collectors pass the time. Technology has presumably muted the thrill of the chase somewhat; thanks to eBay, I could probably assemble a championship-level thimble collection in less than a fortnight if I put my mind to it. What do you do with a collection, apart from look at it? You can clean it, I suppose. You can build a display cabinet. You can bore other people by pointing at bits of it and saying, "Guess how much that one's worth, go on". But apart from that, what's the point? Essentially you're just accumulating atoms. Well whoopie doo. How pointless.

Tell you what else I don't get: breathing. Every day, all day. Breathing. No let up. It's relentless. And that's just a load of atoms too. They go in, they come out, they go back in. Bo-r-ing. When you break it down, it's as futile as collecting stamps or staring at bits of old pot.

In which case, I might as well start nurturing it as a hobby. At least it's one I'll definitely stick to till the day I die.

This week Charlie made a nonsense of everything that he has written above by reading a book on history that he enjoyed: "It's called Voodoo History by David Aaronovitch. Every conspiracy theorist should read it."