Penne for your thoughts? Britain’s ‘most boring’ man spends 3.5 hours sifting through Heinz alphabet tins to compare contents

The weirdly satisfying-looking pictures shows the results of his investigation undertaken last Friday which showed a vast difference in the numbers of letters in each can alongside a rambling write-up of his pasta adventures.

The Facebook post has been liked more than 10,000 times and amassed more than 4,600 shares.

John from Blackburn, Lancashire, said: “It’s a compliment to be described as boring. The idea is to be as boring as possible and not get excited in the write-ups I share online.

“Britain’s most boring man? To be perfectly frank I’m one of the most interesting people in real life.

“The group I post in is about being boring, so on the group I’m the most boring person possible. I do it pretty well.”

John’s post read: “Yesterday me and my wife Deirdre went shopping at the big Tesco and when I was looking for some tins of beans I saw some tins of Alphabetti spaghetti and I have not seen any of them for a long time so we bought two tins and they cost 75p each.

“Today I saw the tins in the cupboard and I thought ‘I wonder if them tins have got all of the letters of the alphabet in’ so I thought I would find out.

“So I got a tin and I opened it and I got a strainer and I tipped all the letters into it and all the tomato sauce went into a pan.

“Then I got Deirdre’s tweezers and I picked all the letters out of the strainer and I put them all on a chopping board and when I finished I tipped all the letters back into the pan with the tomato sauce in it and then I did it with the other tin.

“I found out that both of the tins had got all the letters of the alphabet in and tin 1 had 180 letters in it and tin 2 had 179 letters in it and both tins had some bits of letters in that broke off but I didn’t count them.

“It was hard to do because the letters were a bit slippery because of the tomato sauce and when Deirdre came home we had it for our tea on some toast and we both had two sausages with it as well.”

Bakery packer John, 50, revealed it took 90 minutes to open, strain and separate the 180 letters from tin one and a further 90 minutes to arrange the 179 letters from tin two onto the chopping board.

An additional 30 minutes was spent photographing each stage of the process.

Dad-of-two John said: “It doesn’t say on the tin how many letters were supposed to be in each container so I decided to look into it.

“It took about three and a half hours in total to look at the contents – an hour and a half to look at the contents of each tin and then half an hour taking pictures.

“Both tins had broken letters in there but I didn’t include them.

“I decided to lay them out this way and put a bit of thought into it. I’m a very tidy person, I wanted to make everything look tidy and organised.

“There was a great sense of satisfaction in doing it – it turned out to be a bit of a work of art. I defy anybody to do it tidier than that.

“My wife Deidre, a shop assistant, was at work while I did it. When she came home and saw it she thought it was quite comical.”

Social media users went wild over the post praising his ‘diligence’, branding him a ‘hero’ and suggesting future experiments – including baking a pack of smiley potato faces and ranking them in order of how happy they look.

Modest John replied: “Thank-you, but there are a lot more people that are better heroes than me because all I did was count some letters in two tins of alphabetti spaghetti.”

In the course of John’s investigation, he ranked tin one the better of the two.

John said: “Tin one was definitely superior, the second tin was a bit random and didn’t have as many As or as many Ns.

“If each letter was a Scrabble tile, with numbers allocated to them, then tin one would win.

“Based on the Scrabble scoring system tin one would get 586 points while tin two would reach 576 points. It was close but tin one is definitely the winner.”

A Heinz spokesman said: “Heinz Alphabetti fans have lots of fun making words while they eat and although the letters are a jumble you can always be sure of the perfect mix of spaghetti and tomato sauce.

“A portion is even one of your five a day.”