Good book, bad title

From the The Oxford Times, first published Thursday 12th Jul 2007.

QUEUING FOR BEGINNERS

Joe Moran Profile Books, £14.99

A great title let down by a bad book is common; a good book let down by a bad title, less so. Queuing for Beginners is not a bad title, per se. Just the wrong one for this book, making it sound like Schott's Miscellany of Iranian Dissidents, instead of a cogent analysis of daily life in post-war Britain.

Framed around the average weekday of anyone with an office job, this is a book about how modern life came to be exemplified by ready meals, commuting, attending meetings, and watching the weather forecast. And about the (international) reality that queuing is not some test of strength, but a tedium to be avoided whenever possible.

Like Adams, Bryson and Pratchett before him, Moran has that rare skill of inquiring - like a foreigner, or child - about things we see too often to find strange. He argues that this laziness should not be encouraged, and likens the revealing clutter of the everyday (what's not important about things that happen every day?) to the backlog of e-mails we're expected to delete once in a while: "All human life is in our inboxes. Those little pieces of trivia about routine lives."

Moran's other skill lies in making you want to read every footnote, if only because the works cited - Mechanical Brides, for example, or English Bread and Yeast Cookery - are even more wonderfully arcane than the finished product.

Light and humorous throughout (some tenuous links between hours/chapters, notwithstanding), Queuing for Beginners is a well-sugared dose of cultural history. So much of what we do is social habit, it might not be a bad idea (for those of us under 30) to know how those habits arose. And why they still exist, of course. As Moran points out, we shouldn't take everyday' for granted; people had to fight for it once.

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