These Men Love Extraordinarily Dull Things | Short Film Showcase

We formed the Dolan's Club a while back. We got tired of reading and hearing so much about people always trying to get a fancier car, a bigger house, uh, travel to more exotic places, and come home and tell everybody they go to Las Vegas and come back said, "Hey, I heard, I heard Neil Diamond," you know, big deal.

Dull Men's Club is a place in cyberspace where dull men can hang out and share their experiences with fellow dull men and women that appreciate dull men. It's a sanctuary for them, a place they can hide out, get away from the glitz and glam, the hurly-burly, all the noise of modern life, the pressures to keep up with the Joneses. I don't know who the Joneses are, anyway, do you?

We regard ourselves as dull but not boring. We're grateful for so many things in our lives. There's the, uh, Biscuit Appreciation Society, the Traffic Cone Preservation Society, the Apostrophe Protection Society, the Cloud Appreciation Society; it goes on and on.

The minute I rolled up to this roundabout, I was tingling all over at the beauty of it. This all setting just greets you. It's so quintessentially English in its appearance; it's a listed duck pond, actually, on a roundabout. I've traveled from Jano Gr to Lend, and I've never seen a duck pond on a roundabout. I thought I'd seen everything, but this is certainly going to grace the front cover of our calendar for 2014.

Over the years, I've seen some darn good roundabouts. Some people go for picturesque roundabouts like the one I'm sitting on; we call those titch marshes, which is an island in full bloom. But other people, the functionalists in our society, they might go for the magic roundabout in Swindon, which is the white-knuckle ride of all roundabouts. It's a real maelstrom of motor. Our society goes on day trips there and spends the day just going round and round.

There's the Ding Cockro, there's the Bath Regency roundabout. You could almost see the crack of leather on willow with that roundabout; it's beautiful. I like to see roundabouts as oases on a sea of tarmac. I think they lift our sagging spirits on long tiresome journeys. They're not like robotic fascist traffic lights. How many times have you been on a set of traffic lights and there's nothing coming, but you just stand there burning up petrol? Roundabouts are far more green than traffic lights, which have to be maintained after all, whereas to maintain roundabouts, you’ve just got to mow the lawn. How green is that?

We find there's a lot of joy in just sitting on a park bench, for example, like here in this beautiful park in right in the middle of London. To take my time. Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once. But you know, Cleveland Square is not really a square; it's actually a trapezoid. A lot of the squares in London are not squares. Sloan Square is a rectangle; Grosvenor Square is not a square; it's an oval. I think there really should be a renaming of these squares in London.

We have a dull man of the year listing every year, and one of the nominees last year was a retired postman living in Melin.

Wonderful box, absolutely love it, 160 years old, but rubbish plate, and when it was put on, it was put on crooked. I like this spot; enjoy it very quiet. You got two boxes for the price of one. The hobby has become a photographic challenge. I don't think I could ever photograph them all. There are 115,000, take or give, of boxes in RoM's collection. I think I've probably done about two and a half thousand.

It's become addictive in a way that it takes me to places that I would not normally visit. One of my dear wife's interests is following a musical show around the country, and we've actually seen it over 80 times now in 40 different theaters. We've stayed in many, many hotels, and one of the advantages of that is, of course, invariably, there is a postbox near the hotel.

And they come in all shapes and sizes. In Stoke, some years ago, three boxes right outside the front door; brilliant. One of the benefits of joining the Letter Box Study Group is access and use of their database, and with the help of my son, I have been able to get those references into my GPS unit, and we've set it that it will give me an alarm, a little dingling warning when I approach a post box. I never leave home—or rarely leave home—without it.

I would try and hunt out the grade A's and the grade B's and try and find them. One can go walking around the side streets in towns and villages, and you meet with different people, new people, their curs as to what one is doing. Sometimes one can get some hoots and laughs from passing vehicles.

One of our members has a collection of airport sickness bags. Another member collects toothpicks. Another member collects restaurant menus. We have over 100 categories of items now that they're museums for, like soap, coat hangers, typewriters, staplers, shopping trolleys. Like all collecting, you've got the dealers; you've got the people who collect for monetary advancement, but there are quite a few of us who are quite dedicated milk bottle collectors who collect them for their own sake.

I mean, technically, 175,000 milk bottles are not worth anything, just glass, the most common thing on the planet. But to me, they're worth millions because they're my pride and joy. As far as we know, because there's no way of checking, it is the largest collection of British milk bottles overall in the UK. But I do have friends who specialize.

It ties up well with holidays, trips abroad; we go to places where you wouldn't imagine people would go. Even Trappist from Hong Kong had their own milk in bottles. Somebody rings me up, or I get a tip on there's a dairy closing down, or somebody's found a barn with some milk bottles; I'm away. I like the glass, and I like the social history. They're nice to handle.

Milk bottles do have a sort of tactile feel to them. This one has got Union Jack on, and this is just a very nice example where you have the blue and the red, and obviously, the milk when it's inside provides the white background. Well, um, I've always—I've never not really—just don't like milk. It's nothing I would ever drink. I always believed it, Ted, as baby food. And ever since they brought out what I call blue milk, which is that milk with no fat in it, have you ever had Corn Flakes with skimmed milk? It's awful.

Topics we talk about when do men get together, of course, are airport luggage carousels. We started making notes whether they go clockwise or counterclockwise. We don't like the word so much anti-clockwise; it infers that we're against clocks. We like clocks. We particularly like clocks twice a year when we get to stay up late and change of at 2 in the morning.

But anyway, the predominant way is counterclockwise, not clockwise. An engineer from Gatwick Airport explained to us why: it's because most people are right-handed, and you've got better leverage to pick up your bag off the rack if it's coming from your left in clockwise, from your right.

It all started back in around about 1999. I worked for 16 years at Rothwell Cy, just south of Leeds. All the buildings have been demolished; it was a derelict site. The reason I got into brick collecting was because I noticed that these bricks were lying about, and the names of the brick makers were there, and that's where the interest started, because none of these brick makers were still in business.

I thought, really, that it was part of our industrial heritage that’s gone by the board. So anyway, when I got them home, by this time I picked up maybe about 40 different bricks with different makers' names on. I didn't know what to do with them, so I eventually finished up putting a path down and building a small wall here with the name showing, and it became a bit of an obsession.

So every time we go out now, nine times out of ten, I will come back with a brick, and it would add to the collection. Any hedge row, you'd be surprised where they are; they're all over the place, and nobody wants them except us.

My wife Morin is a wee bit long-suffering over the brick problem because I put maybe three rows of bricks down here, and as I got more and more, I had to extend it. But I was taking up grass, so then I had to go to the wall and build the wall up a wee bit, but that keeps falling down. It was a battleground. Yeah, but I won eventually.

But I didn't put any more down there; the line's definitely drawn. My wife of 41 or 42 years is very very supportive of what I do. She is a bit more minimalist, if you like, than me. She often comes with me while we're watching and looking for post boxes. She helps me once every year or so where we clean every bottle in there.

This is dull; it is not all post boxes, but I am let off the leash every now and again. She's quite happy for me to go wandering. My ex-wife hated the fact that I was around about spotting, and in the end, she left me. But I don't mind that, because I can go out and do roundabout spotting whenever I want.

I love riding escalators. A long ride is enjoyable; you can stand there and relax and not be anxious about getting off for a while; just stand back there and look at the pictures on each side, the adverts. On a longer ride, the adverts repeat themselves every so often, so if you miss completely reading one at one point, you can just wait till you get a little farther down the escalator, and it'll appear again.

Again, I quite frankly don't know why people walk on escalators. If you're going to walk, take the stairs; leave the escalators alone for us people to just enjoy a pure escalator ride. I just marvel at the engineering behind escalators, to think that they're doing the job for us, that I don't have to exert myself to go downstairs or go back upstairs.

It's like I'm just floating down into the subway station. If somebody were to say I were dull, I’d take it as a compliment, actually. You can call me dull if you like. I thought there's no such thing as an uninteresting roundabout. Even the humble PMT stroke of genius, it was, but we don't like driving over those things. You should navigate accordingly and go around them, and if it does look artistic, I suppose it does, really, don't they?

Tracey Aming could make something out of them, do you think? All right, mate, this is one of the fellow roundabout spotters here. He's actually made love on a roundabout, haven't you? He's what we call a bonking bter.

You know, life seems to be continually speeding up: cars are faster, planes are faster now, the modern world is busy, busy, busy. The thing that illustrates it more to us is the mobile phone. To date, I don't have a mobile phone; they can play music, they can do everything with a simple mobile performance about half the size of a brick.

Don't need one. I don't walk into telegraph poles. I like to take in as much of where I'm going or what's in front of me as I can. You can take time and reflect on life; it could be an old lamp post, a finger post, a directional sign. We need to just take a step back and just go around a roundabout twice, slowly. There's a lot to be said for being dull.

Everything that you're made of lasts longer. It used to get us out, actually; it got you the exercise. If you suffer from a nervous disposition or got heart trouble, it's the perfect hobby for you is just to sit back and take in these beautiful pieces of round architecture.

People often ask, "Is the Dull Men's Club a movement?" No, it's not a movement; we like to stay put. People also ask us, "Is the Dull Men's Club one of these 12-step programs?" No, 12-step programs try to get people to change their behavior. The Doran's Club is a two-step program. We admit we're dull, and we're going to keep it that way.

Yeah, I'm the type of guy who likes to stay at home. I'm always in one place, and that's my front room. And when I find myself not enough of it, I get myself to bed because that's a sensible thing to do. I'm not the wanderer; I don't like wandering. I don't know why, though.

Yes, I'm the wer—no, I'm not the wanderer; I like to stay at home. That's right; not bother to roam. Think I got to bed now.