When it comes to queuing I am very patient.

It does, however, depend upon what I am queuing for. If there is something important to be sorted out - a financial discrepancy at the bank, or a document such as a passport to be issued - I don’t mind standing in line for however long it takes.

Likewise, with entertainment. I haven’t stood in a queue for a concert - like my youngest daughter did last year for 12 hours to see Beyonce - for decades, but that’s not to say I won’t do in the future.

But with consumer goods, there is a limit. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I popped into a bargain warehouse last week to be faced with a queue about half a mile long of customers, each with a massive trolley load of goods. One woman waiting in the middle of this line had been queuing for an hour.

The British are renowned for their supposed love of queuing. In his essay ‘The English People’, George Orwell wrote that a foreigner would be struck by the English crowd’s ‘willingness to form queues.’ He may be right. This year, on a visit to a monastery in Montserrat, Spain, my family and a number of other English people joined a queue snaking towards the building. We spent more than an hour there, until my bored daughters wandered off and came back to tell us all that the queue was for a small crypt and the entrance to the main church, which was just out of sight around the corner, had no queue at all. How silly we felt.

In places like railway stations and main post offices, queuing systems have been revolutionised with one snake-like line confined to a roped-off channel, as opposed to the old way of queuing at different windows. You took a chance as to whether the people in front were simply buying stamps or paying in cash, or carrying out a complex transaction involving a third party in Guatemala that would take an hour. You swapped lines at your peril.

York Press:

The joys of queueing...

Cashpoints demand a different etiquette altogether, where people keep an exaggerated distance behind the person at the dispenser, to give the impression that they are not at all interested in learning their pin number.

Not a day goes by without having to stand in a queue. Today I queued in three places, the sandwich shop, the post office and the building society. It was lunchtime and the latter had just two people serving - a nonsensical, yet common occurrence. And the time of year means queues are three times longer than usual. I fancied a flapjack from a local bakers, but the queue rivalled that for the roller coaster at Flamingo Land on August Bank Holiday.

I have to admit that if I see a queue I feel a compulsion to join it. But to my husband’s great relief, I decided that, however much I craved that cut-price leaf blower, ski goggles (again, you never know) and magic pants (‘lose inches without having to slim’), the bargain warehouse wasn’t worth the wait.