Joe Moran - Queuing for Beginners: The Story of Daily Life From Breakfast to Bedtime

Wonderfully entertaining Trust me, its hilarious Every page pulses with humour, ephemeral research and irresistible nuggets of useless information His book is your life, examined by a post-modern academic in fluent and breezy style, social history at its most accessible Val Hennessy, Daily Mail

Here is a book for everyone It is crammed with arresting facts and insights. Joe Moran writes more elegantly than a social historian has any right to I kept wanting to read out bits of this book to my children. Partly because it sets in context the activities that will take up most of their life and partly because it might teach them just how little that is dismissed as boring truly deserves the description Andrew Martin, Sunday Times

His magnifying-glass focus makes the banal and everyday surprising and often riveting Fascinating stuff, and Moran delivers it in a relaxed and often hilarious style. It makes you yearn for a revival of the Mass-Observation projects of the late 1930s Kate Colquhoun, Daily Telegraph

An affectionate tribute to British life thats very funny and bang up to date with chapters on email etiquette and the seven-minute lunch break. It made me want to take the author to the pub, where Id ask him why we drink beer in pints Sam West, Independent

A thoroughly novel and refreshing way of looking at our recent history. This is mundane as a good thing. It is a daybreak to bedtime story told further from them, and nearer to us. Almost every page has its yes! Id forgotten moment. I loved his book enormously Andrew Marr

A wonderfully insightful probe into the habits and rituals that have made up daily life in Britain since the Second World War. Almost nothing escapes Joe Morans penetrating gaze; an inspired anthropologist of the ordinary, and often very funny, he turns his readers into informed observers, and gives an enhanced understanding of what we do every day without a second thought and why we do it. Youll never eat a slice of toast, join a queue or send an email in the same way again Juliet Gardiner

Queuing for Beginners is a splendidly entertaining book. Joe Moran takes a simple but wonderfully imaginative idea, following an ordinary working day from breakfast to bedtime, and uncovers the twentieth-century history of the mundane rituals through which we structure our lives. Nothing escapes his gaze, from cereal packets to chain pubs, and the result is a deft, clever and endlessly fascinating example of social history at its best Dominic Sandbrook

An original idea thats well-executed and of interest to anyone whos enjoyed a fry-up, stood by a water-cooler and slept under a duvet. By interrogating the history of everyday objects and routines, Moran reveals the contingent, often extraordinary, nature of daily life in Britain, and the material culture that dominates it in the early twenty-first century. I thoroughly enjoyed it Richard Weight

Perfect summer reading Sunday Express

An admirably comprehensive and well-researched series of studies of everything from the fag break to the rush hour His chapter on the rise of the sofa is a fine piece of social history Financial Times

Insightful and entertaining social history Morans lively examination of the arcana of the ordinary reveals the monumental social and cultural changes that have transformed British life since the war Herald

Joe Morans lively and entertaining look into the habits that make us who we are succeeds in showing just how much the little things in life matter Metro

Full of fascinating snippets Scotland on Sunday

Excellent book may attract derision for its commitment to examining the most basic and visible aspects of our lives. I, for one, reckon the bleeding obvious is the best place to start New Statesman

This entertaining book reminds us that our most mundane daily activities are social history in the making Glasgow Evening Times

Moran has ingeniously compartmentalised in chapters the history of everyday life in Britain since WWII Aberdeen Evening Express

A fascinating dissection of daily life thoroughly entertaining and informative Sainsburys Magazine

Its a fast and funny read guaranteed to delight your inner nerd Spiked online

One of those rare books written with academic rigour which has mass market appeal. As a snapshot of how life used to be and what it has become this book cant be beaten www.bookbag.co.uk

Joe Moran is a reader in cultural history at Liverpool John Moores University. His academic research is on everyday life, and he writes regularly for the New Statesman and the Guardian. He lives in Liverpool.

Queuing for
Beginners

The Story of Daily Life from
Breakfast to Bedtime

Joe Moran

This paperback edition published in 2008

First published in Great Britain in 2007 by

Profile Books Ltd

3A Exmouth House

Pine Street

Exmouth Market

London EC1R 0JH

www.profilebooks.com

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Copyright Joe Moran 2007, 2008

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved
above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced
into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means
(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the
prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of
this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available

from the British Library.

eISBN 9-781-84765-065-8

Text design by Sue Lamble

Typeset in Palatino by MacGuru Ltd

info@macguru.org.uk

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Bookmarque, Croydon, Surrey

For Tom and Charlie

Contents

Writing about the minutiae of daily life must seem like a very strange habit. So I am grateful to all the friends, family and colleagues who have indulged me in various ways during the writing of this book, either by reading draft chapters or offering various forms of help: Jo Croft, Elspeth Graham, Glenda Norquay, Michael Moran, Winifred Moran, Liam Moran, Catherine Wainhouse and Joanna Price.

I would also like to thank Caroline Pretty, Penny Daniel and Nicola Taplin for their help in preparing the manuscript; and particularly my editor Daniel Crewe, who has supported this project from the very beginning and been a wonderfully rigorous but encouraging reader throughout.

The Mass-Observation material quoted in this book is reproduced with the kind permission of the Trustees of the Mass-Observation Archive, and is copyright the Trustees of the Mass-Observation Archive. The extract from September 1, 1939 is taken from The English Auden published by Faber & Faber Ltd.

And the dedication is for my nephew and niece, whose daily habits are always a delight to observe.

There are more truths in twenty-four hours of a manslife than in all the philosophies

Raoul Vaneigem

On Friday 12 March 1937, a series of uninteresting events unfolded across Britain. In Liverpool, a young office worker riding his bike accidentally knocked down an elderly woman, and a labourer told him off for not ringing his bell. He went out at lunchtime to buy a hat for his wedding, and then ate at a Lyons Corner House with a friend. In a Birmingham suburb, a housewife was awakened from a strange dream about the author Aldous Huxley by her five-year-old son singing nursery rhymes. She waited for a man to call to read the gas meter, before going out to return some library books. In Northumberland, an accountant rose at 7.50 a.m. and decided to postpone shaving because he was going to a dance in the evening. At lunchtime he withdrew some money from the bank. On the evening train home, he noticed his fellow passengers had made little circles in the steamed-up windows with their coat sleeves so they could look out, which reminded him of wiping the bloom off a plum.