Bores

Someone in The Telegraph yesterday was writing about the Duke of Edinburgh's response to a TV gardener at the Chelsea Flower Show who not only corrected the Duke on a mistake he had made in identifying a certain plant but then proceeded to talk about the plant at length, imagining he was entertaining the Duke; the Duke walked off, muttering under his breath: "I don't want a bloody lecture."
Why did the man have to go on and on about his particular interest as if his listener, in this case the Duke, would be also has interested as he? In other words - people can be real bores when they believe they are being informative.
How do you cope with this sort of person? Well, the writer says you say "We must do lunch sometime...." having no intention of doing any such thing, and walking away. Or "Lovely to have met you...." not meaning a word of it but moving away as he says it.
I used to know a bore.... No, not a bore, the bore of all bores. I shall call him G.W.
G.W. could have bored the skin off a corpse.
One day, at lunch, sitting next to him, I made the mistake of asking him how his operation for something or other went. Half an hour later we had made it to the stairs leading to the library and his story of his visit to the hospital had only got as far as his leaving the house in an ambulence.
I said: "Sorry G.W. but I have to go to the library for something." He said "For what?" I said "A book." He said "What book?"
But by now I had managed to move away. "See you at the Christmas function," he said.
"Like Hell I will," I thought, waving happily to him as I left.
Yet, would you believe it? he was one of the best actors/comedians/singers I had in the group I used to get together for my college's Christmas panto. Then he was not a bore at all. He was the villain in Alladin or the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk or whatever.
The thing was - he wasn't himself for a while.