Why aren't we waiting?

Let's reclaim the lost art of killing time and celebrate the boredom of just hanging around
    • The Guardian,
    • Jump to comments ()
The current BBC4 series The Waiting Room is a refreshing phenomenon: a TV programme without a narrative hook. Filmed in various places where people wait, from nail salons to launderettes, it simply records the boredom, silence and aimless conversations that ensue. It is a useful corrective to the constant refrain that our lives are more hectic, mobile and "time-poor" than ever.

The waiting room was once a significant place in public life. Newspaper editorials would lament the smouldering fires, obsolete reading matter and bumpy seats in railway-station waiting rooms and doctors' surgeries. "The furniture and decoration are usually in the very abyss of dullness," complained the Times in 1925. But the reason people complained about waiting rooms is that they had to use them: they were places where all social classes, from vagrants to professionals, shared a temporary berth.

These public amenities declined as the market got better at helping us to fill moments of dead time. The espresso bar made such an impact in the 1950s because it was the one place that young people could while away a few hours. It is no longer true, as Tosco Fyvel wrote in 1963, that a "pall of boredom," a "dead and shuttered look," descends on the average British town after dark. The station waiting room has been killed off by Caffe Ritazza and the easing of the licensing laws.

Technology has also transformed the experience of waiting. Now we practise what sociologists call "micro-coordination": we use mobile phones to arrange our social lives rather than waiting for each other in designated places. The landmark meeting point, like the famous clock at Waterloo station, is losing its appeal. When I first came to Liverpool a decade ago, I often saw people waiting outside Lewis's department store, a historic meeting place where John Lennon picked up his dates. No one waits there any more; they are all in Wetherspoon's checking their text messages.

The reputation of waiting has never really recovered from the cold war. Behind the iron curtain, waiting was a way of life. There were endless queues for basic necessities; decade-long waiting lists for "luxury" goods like cars and telephones; traffic lights even remained on red for longer than in the west. The old GDR regime tried to persuade its citizens that waiting was a practical lesson in communism - a queue was a "Wartekollektiv" (a waiting collective).

Wealth and status in modern capitalist economies, by contrast, depend on the capacity to accumulate resources . And waiting is the opposite of this: it is simply dead time.

Where it is most unavoidable, such as in airports, waiting is also experienced most unequally. While the fortunate few get free drinks and foot massages in the first-class lounge, those in cattle class perch on their suitcases, gazing blankly at the annunciator boards.

But I have a lot of time for waiting. It is, after all, an efficient and equitable means of rationing public goods. And, as the BBC4 series shows, just hanging around, sharing the same space with people we would not normally encounter, can create its own epiphanies.

Last week, I went to the dentist. The waiting room looked like it hadn't been touched for decades: there were the battered plastic chairs, the ancient copies of People's Friend, the faded posters telling me off about the state of my gums. And hanging over it all was that enduring mixture of boredom and fear. "About the dentist's waiting room," wrote one journalist in 1950, "there is the chill of death, a whiff of corruption and the morgue." It is heartening to know that some institutions are still keeping up the finest British traditions of waiting.

· Joe Moran's book, Queuing for Beginners, is published by Profile in May

Latest posts

Today's best video

Today in pictures