People's hobbies are more their measure than their jobs. -- Robert Byrne

As I was sitting on the 15.06 from Worthing to London Victoria, I passed through Clapham Junction, and there sure enough, true to stereotype and preconception were a huddle of middle-aged gentlemen clad in a variety of shiny, quilted nylon bomber jackets, watching, photographing, and unquestionably "spotting" trains. And I thought to myself “ Why on earth would you want to do that?” After all, if you wanted to compile a list of British rolling stock, this must be about the most inefficient way to do it. Nothing that a trip to a book shop or a phone call to some train companies, and a few hours copying out the details into the requisite small notebooks wouldn’t sort out, and yet still people wanted to come and stand earnestly in the drizzle. In fact the more I thought about it, the more I just didn’t get it.

But then, it occurred to me that there were plenty of things I had done that nobody else could comprehend as being anything other than purgatorial or futile – visiting all 92 football league grounds, cycling for 90 hours non-stop on a tandem for example. Clearly there were hundreds, perhaps thousands of different pastimes that people indulge in that were just like that. The league of cat-fanciers could no more understand the delights of kite-surfing, than the troops of line dancers wanted to go and re-enact historical battles.

So I wanted to find out more about the myriad of different ways we choose to spend our free time, and in particular I wanted to meet and understand what drives those people who take a hobby to its extremes – not to sneer or mock or poke a finger of supercilious contempt into their metaphorical matchstick model of York Minster - after all one person’s tedious obsession is another’s infectious passion. More, I wanted to celebrate the diversity, singularity, perversity, and creativity of the human spirit and its fortitude, and enduring capacity to find bizarre and incongruous ways in which to express it.

Effectively this is travel writing, but not of where we live, but what we do with ourselves once we’re there - meeting small tribes of “foreign” and undiscovered peoples, without having to cross continents to get there. The point of this non-travelogue is to enjoy each other’s quirks by noticing our sameness whilst revelling in our differences. It is also to suggest that it doesn’t so much matter what you do, or even that you do it well, but that you do it wholeheartedly and unreservedly, so that whether a hobby forms a brief dalliance or a lifelong obsession, you can look back on it and say “well played!”

So here are a few obsessive hobbies which I have either dallied with or come across in my meanderings. There are plenty more to come - why not tell me about yours?

 

92 Club

In which the serial obsession begins, with an empty weekend in April with no local football to watch. Having scoured the sports pages I spotted the nearest match – Lincoln City v Preston North End. Splendid. And so it proved. The Preston fans sunned themselves in the far corner and bobbed about in time to the exuberant bass drummer who was as circular in his corpulence as his equally amply-proportioned instrument, and probably about as resonant had anyone been brave enough to give him a similarly resounding thwack.

OK, so some people hate the idea of watching football per se, so to them the lure of a tour round all 92 football league clubs is never going to be appealing, but suspend disbelief sufficiently to accept that watching football is for many people (myself included) a perfectly normal, enjoyable, non-obsessive hobby. Then meet Ebby, the fanatical Nottingham Forest supporter who travels to every home game from Duisburg in Germany – despite the fact that this is clearly a ludicrous life-compromising thing to do. Luckily for him in the course of his travels he met his fiancé Heike, a fellow fan, with whom he can now share his logistically and financially challenged spare time. But why do they do it? Love of the game? Love of the team? Certainly, but delve a little deeper and it is the satisfaction of completeness – of collecting a full set of home fixtures that is also a motivator. But what turns a harmless passive pastime into an acquisitive collection? At what point does the hobby take on a life of its own?

Following my seemingly innocuous excursion to rural fenland, the question naturally arose as to how many grounds I might already have been to. A brief tot up on the back of an envelope was somehow not satisfying enough, so some sellotape and a couple of rolls of wallpaper later and I had a 6 foot map of the country upon which I could stick a spot for each ground.

So, with 28 of the 92 in the bag without even knowing I was trying, thereafter each free weekend was spent at a new ground, and each new season’s fixtures seized as an opportunity to map out time-efficient fixture combinations – how about a Reading/Swindon combo, taking in both a 12pm and 3pm kickoff – who could resist? Why wouldn’t anyone want to sample the delights of Brentford – the only ground in the football league with a pub on each corner; or see for yourself the uphill slog on the steepest sloping pitch at Barnet?

In fact, you know the 92 Club bug has bitten when you’re driving half-naked, drying your trousers out on the hot air blower in the car between back to back fixtures at Torquay and Exeter reminiscing about that day the train broke down in the flood after the abortive waterlogged fixture at Carlisle.

Of course every good obsessive hobby needs other obsessives to share it with, and so there exists the 92 Club itself – the official arbiter and administrator of certificates, awards and green polyester cravats. Aspirants must send off their logbook with details of dates, fixtures, scores and attendance of every match claimed. “But you could just copy that out of the Sunday paper!” one friend remarked – “don’t you have to produce a ticket stub or a programme or something?” Well, you could copy it out I suppose, but why would you? – and with that suddenly I am to all intents and purposes a trainspotter at Clapham Junction, rejecting the suggestion that I print the current list of locomotives of the internet…

"I find nothing more satisfying than the quiet 'splish, splish' of digested Holland's pie hitting an Ashton Gate water closet bowl; or the electrifying thrill of generous pebble-dashing of the porcelain of Brunton Park's gents. And there can be no greater excitement than leaving your very own calling card in a particularly despised ground - I've done more bricks at Bloomfield Road than they have fans" - Grover,on his 92 Club experience in Bob Lord’s Sausage, the Burnley FC Fanzine

Pigeon Racing has a long and noble history, and one which is carried on with some gusto through the pages of the august publication British Homing World, which proudly markets itself as being “Britain’s Premier Pigeon Racing Weekly”. Exactly how fierce the opposition for this coveted position may be is unclear, but with a circulation of some 30,000 copies per week, there are clearly a large number of pigeons bedding down in their lofts on shredded copies of the back issues.

Pigeon racing enables the owner to be breeder, dietician, manager, trainer, coach and competitor. The sport prides itself in endearingly gritty Northern fashion on giving the working man with a small shed in the back garden the opportunity to outwit the more extravagent competitors for whom expense has no limit.

Despite all my impressions hereto which suggested that pigeons are scrawny, smelly goggly-eyed city-centre pests with misshapen feet and maldirected excrement, it would appear that the pigeon is a far more gallant creature, with 31 of the 53 Dickin medals for animal bravery awarded in the second world war being given to our avian friends. The sight of a pigeon attempting to race back home with a shiny brass gong pinned to its feathered breast was enough to tempt me into a pigeon loft by itself, but news that Pigeons today still provoke vehemently passionate reactions was even more intriguing. Long Distance Pigeon Racers are currently lobbying the government and RSPCA over the issue of prize racing pigeons being killed by birds of prey. With raptors protected by law, all a pigeon fancier can do is stand by and watch his hard work and pride and joy be ripped apart and killed before his eyes, without even a shake of a broom-handle to wardoff the predators.

With the lure of blood guts, triumph, despair, police raids, the screening of pigeons for illegal performance-enhancing drugs, and the promise of a free flat cap and whippet with every Northern stereotype disproven Pigeon fancying is the stuff of novels.

 

Did you know there are over 150000 hidden treasure chests in 215 countries worldwide – over 5000 in the UK alone - hidden in a variety of locations, from the more straightforward spot under a fallen log, to a crevice in a rock face or the bottom of a lake? In fact there could be one right near where you are sitting right now. No, neither did I, but on a humdrum walk round a lake in the West Midlands one weekend with our toddlers in tow, a hitherto unremarkable and quirk-free friend pulled out a GPS device and started studying it closely. “We’re nearly there!” she yelled, and disappeared off into some scrubland. “Aha!” came the shriek and she waved a lego brick triumphantly. Now, we are always losing lego bricks in the oddest of places in my house, but this was surreal enough to warrant further investigation. And so it was revealed that an elaborate network of global high-tech hide and seek exists, all based around coordinates and the use of a GPS device.

During an idle moment in the office I had a slightly half-hearted look to see if there were any near me. Obviously there wouldn’t be anything in the centre of Leeds – but no, one right in the middle and another one down at Granary Wharf, doable in a lunch hour perhaps? And plenty more nearer to home. More and more intriguing. So what are these things? Who is it who goes hunting for them, and who on earth puts them there in the first place?

The theory behind the game is simple and relatively pastoral – a Geocacher will go to a location which has usually some special interest or beauty, and at the location, they will hide a small waterproof box containing a few bits and pieces, (usually of little value, like the lego-brick discovery) a logbook and a pen or pencil. Using their GPS receiver, the cacher records the coordinates of their cache and returns home to log its existence on a website. Someone else will see the listing about the cache, enter the coordinates into their GPS receiver and go in search of it. When they find it, the finder may take something from the cache and leave something in return, and for posterity, enter a log in the logbook. When the seeker returns home, he/she should log on the website that they have found the cache and pass any comments they wish. These logs are important to the cache hider; it is part of their "reward" for hiding the cache.

So, a sort of collision of cultures pastime – orienteering bearded goretex and sandal-wearer meets broadband techy-nerd? Potentially active, with all that yomping around unable to get to the spot you need because of a housing estate, or canal. Potentially acquisitive, with the satisfaction of collecting another “cache”. But could it really be obsessive – do people take it to extremes? Are the gnome gardens of Wastwater, and the fully fitted bathroom at the bottom of Windermere merely 5* difficulty-rating Geocaches? £100 and a GPS device later and I’m off to find out…

OK – when it comes to involuntary-smirk-inducing hobbies, morris dancing has got to be way up there amongst the all-time greats. All that foppish foll-rolling and jingling about the place with pigs bladders in the name of fertility is just asking for it, surely?

Which makes it all the more amazing that from an almost exclusively male preserve with a mere handful of teams performing in this country around 100 years ago, there are now over 1000 (including many women), including several villages which boast two opposing teams and some of the bitterest competitive rivalries around, including an ongoing feud about the lack of traditional basis for lady’s morris. So, ground glass in the loving cup? Drawing pins in the clogs? Razor edged hankies? If there’s intrigue and drama afoot, then I’m all for it – surely it can only be a matter of time before I find lady morris-ers flouncing out of an Olde Englishe Ale house, as their fellow dancers yell “Leave it out, ‘e’s not worf it…” to a background drum roll.

However, ferocious competition and melodrama seem a million miles removed from every exposure to Morris dancing I’ve ever had. Certainly I can believe one could be either good at it, or, as I can ably demonstrate, completely rubbish; and leaping around weighed down with bells and encumbered by ribbons unquestionably adds to the athleticism. But competition? Well, perhaps that is merely a branch of the same debate that we have in our house every time rhythmic gymnastics is on “Clever – yes. Bizarre – without doubt. Sport – Hmmmm.” In fact maybe rhythmic gymnastics is simply Extreme Morris – ribbons, hoops, skipping about to music…

Despite its familiarity, Morris is virtually a secret society – with members almost Masonic in their reluctance to reveal the intricacies of the dance figures that are, they say, “absorbed, not learned”. Infiltrating the ranks was not going to be easy. Whether by virtue of this opacity or not, Morris’ grip on the hearts and minds of the average punter, I was gloomily informed, seems to be slipping. A recent survey, reported that only 24% of young Britons see Morris as a key part of our traditional heritage. Of course given that the vast majority of young Britons have difficulty recognising their own prime minister, it seemed to me that as minority pastimes go, this one was relatively high profile. And with the incentive of a bulk discount if I ordered more than 25 official Morris Federation bells in one go, Morris’s profile looks set to soar in my house at least.