Review of 'Queuing for Beginners' by Joe Moran

Surely the British have always been obsessed by the weather, consumed clutcher inducing fry ups for breakfast, and have stood in line since time immemorial.

Not so, says Joe Moran, who in this intricate little book, outlines the provenance of these and many other everyday lifestyle traits. Queuing for beginners is a social history book that looks at society through a close lens microscope. Eschewing the big political and economic themes normally associated with social change, he shows just what crazy folk we really are as he traces the typical day of an average British adult – a person who arises in the morning, eats a bowl of cereal for breakfast, squeezes into a packed train and commutes to the office, sits at a desk with a computer, attends meetings, fires off more emails than are strictly necessary, has a pint or two in the pub after work, heats up a supermarket ready-meal for dinner, watches a bit of TV (especially the weather forecast) then retires to bed under a duvet (a now commonplace bed furnishing that only dates from 1964 when Terence Conran opened the first Habitat store in South Kensington) and tries to get as much sleep as possible in this era of constant bustle and distraction.

Such a narrative might seem like the most boring book since the two volume Paddy Ashdown diaries, but it is actually a compelling look of the myriad little things that appear in our days. Drawing on a vast range of archival research (Moran is a lecturer in everyday life at Liverpool John Moores University), the author finds that there is a fascinating story behind just about everything we take for granted. The first pedestrian crossings, marked by Belisha Beacons (named after the minister of transport, Leslie Hore-Belisha in 1934) caused a scandal when they were first introduced. Militant protestors fired shots at them with air rifles as they believed the introduction of pedestrian crossings had effectively conceded the rest of the highway to the motor car. The modern form of queue – a single line in which people are called to the next free cashier by an electronic display –only became widespread in the 1990s. Before that, individual queue lines were the norm, leading to the commonplace frustration of joining the shortest queue only to find it was the slowest moving since an elderly man at the front was engaged in a long and protracted argument with the cashier.

An entire chapter is devoted to a single item of furniture – the sofa. Historically, it was a low status item, mocked as a shapeless, lumpen article. In the twentieth century, design traits from Scandinavia slimmed and reduced the size of the sofa and its modern manifestation - especially the minimalist IKEA sofa, often bought on hire purchase - is a far cry from the traditional sofa which was traditionally a lifetime wedding present for a married couple.

In so much as the book is didactical, the lesson Joe Moran seems to want to impart, is to make us take a closer look at our everyday surroundings. If we occasionally pause in our hectic lives to take note of exactly how the packaged sandwich has come to dominate our lunchtime eating habits, or why we have so many more TV channels than we used to, we can begin to realise that our lives are not endlessly recycled Groundhog Day style routines, but part of a constantly evolving historical time. In twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years time, many aspects of our everyday lives will be quite different, and the Prêt a Manger sandwich and the IKEA sofa may be objects of as much nostalgia as the Bakelite telephone or the 1940s railway carriage.