I am sure many of you will have booked an inter-city train journey at some time or other, complete with an allocated seat. Now be honest, despite having an assigned seat, did you arrive well in advance of your journey, queue in the station and then make a dash for your carriage and seat (despite the unequivocal proof of your reserved seat either in your hand or on your handset)? And then you sit on the train for half an hour waiting for it to depart?

If the answer to each question above is “yes”, why, with an allocated seat and its proof, did you? It's the equivalent of knowing lunch is being served at precisely 13.15 and no earlier, yet you arrive at your table at 12.30 and sit there for three-quarters of an hour with a knife and fork in your hand but with no food in sight until the assigned 13.15 service time.

And it's the same with air travel. You pay the budget carriers for a “priority” seating pass (plus all their other optional extras that you end up laying out for, such as luggage, sandwich, tea, movie, toilet, air, life-jacket etc.). Yet, the moment boarding is announced, despite having your allocated seat-ticket in your hand that even the air travel authorities themselves confirm yours statutorily for the duration of the flight, you jump into the queue and stand there waiting for some 30 or more minutes to board.

Why are the British so keen on queueing?

The methodical British queue has its roots in the early 19th Century, very much a creation of industry and urbanisation where crowds of people were brought together. Such large numbers of people simply had a marked effect on these areas and their daily life not seen previously. And the orderly queue was very much a feature of the British stiff upper lip, where, in times of hardship, people of very different social backgrounds were thrown together, where none wanted to “let their own side down”.

However, while the initial queue might appear very civilised today, let’s not fool ourselves. Once the bus, train or tram arrives, unless there are guiding barriers, it’s everyone for themselves.

How could we improve our queueing habits?

Some years ago, Prof Lars Peter Osterdal of the University of Southern Denmark suggested that those who queue the longest should actually be served the latest. He claimed it makes purchasing something altogether more efficient and smoother through the idea of “contra-queuing” (his terminology). He meant that those who infuriatingly start queueing three days before a new product (like a specific mobile phone) is due should be the ones that get served the last – a way of teaching them a lesson that they should just act like normal shoppers and buy what they require only when they require it.

“Serve the people at the back of the queue first”, he said, with profound wisdom seldom seen in today’s modern world. Or even seen in the ancient world. Altogether profoundly professorial, this seems to demonstrate a somewhat keen lack of understanding of the actual purchasing psyche. The Nobel Prize-chasing Professor suggests that, if, for example, a popular entertainment act was to announce a tour, with tickets going on sale at 11 am one morning, using the theory of “contra-queuing”, no one would want to be first to buy tickets. So, he is, in essence, proposing that no one will respond when events are advertised, as with the current craze, some 14 months in advance. Venues should then have the intense luxury of an altogether laid-back, even snail’s pace to sell tickets directly themselves a mere few weeks before the event.

Could this mark the end of the sometime less-than-moral online ticketing agencies and their devil incarnate secondary-ticketing subsidiaries offering tickets in a rush on the internet those self-same 14 months in advance of the event taking place? Plus the booking fee.

It was a coincidence that I was sent this information at the same time as the announcement of the arrival of a “new” iPhone. An iPhone that, in reality, will be almost the same as its predecessor, just with a few new and extremely pointless add-ons, none of which will improve the quality of either your phone calls or texts. If aliens were to appear on earth suddenly, I wonder what they would make of those who queue for hours to buy a piece of telephonic equipment that, in reality, does nothing new except reduce the balance of their bank accounts. A piece of technology will be in over-supply within a week of its launch. And I, for one, would never cynically suggest that manufacturers might purposefully hold back supplies of their mass-produced products to create an artificial shortage.

I believe the newly-arrived aliens from Planet Zog would be of no danger to us, seeing as they would all be in uncontrollable fits of laughter at the queuing antics of us humans.